Sitemap Contains URL That Have Been Redirected - Support

Resolved Anonymous
7 months, 3 weeks ago

Rank Math free

Hello. I recently made a major change to my website because various SEO tools were saying I had duplicate content because of “/product-category/” and “/name-of parent-category/” in my URLs. For example, they saw https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/product-category/toys-and-games/collectible-toy-vehicles as a duplicate to https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/product-category/toys-and-games/collectible-dolls.

Obviously, they aren’t duplicates but I got tired of them constantly reporting such URLs as problems. So, I decided to change my URL structure and I removed /product-category/ and parent category names from my URLs by doing a 301 redirect directly to the subcategory. For example, I redirected https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/product-category/toys-and-games/collectible-toy-vehicles to https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/collectible-toy-vehicles. I made this change for every single one of my subcategory URLs.

However, now I’m being told that my sitemap still has the old URLs. So I edited all of my parent category and subcategory canonical URLs (under the Advanced Tab) to be the New direct URL (excluding /product-category/ and /name-of-parent-category/). In doing so I see that now my sitemap for product categories is completely empty. What can I do to get the product category sitemap (https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/product_cat-sitemap.xml) populated with the product categories (of which there are about 56)?

Thank you for your assistance and I look forward to your response.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

Jeremy
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Hello,

Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.

Can you please confirm how you have removed the /product-category/ slug? If you removed it using our base remover option in Rank Math > General Settings > WooCommerce, that should automatically be updated to the sitemap.

Can you please try that and follow the steps below and see if that works for you?

1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp

2. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server. For plugins or Cloudflare, please follow this article:
https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

3. Apply the following filter code to your site.
```
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');
```
Here’s how you can add filter to your WordPress site:https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Let us know how that goes. Looking forward to helping you.
RankBot
6 months ago

Hello,

Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.

If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.

Thank you.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The ticket ‘Sitemap Contains URL That Have Been Redirected’ is closed to new replies.