General HTTP error: 404 not found HTTP Error: 404

Hi, Thanks for the great plugin. I am getting -404 error. I did read the sticky post and resubmitted sitemap to google. But, getting the same error. I do have w3tc with “Do not process 404 errors for static objects with WordPress” checked.

1st of all, I didn’t realize the issue for a month, now but started researching when google failed to index my post for days, which usually get indexes in matter of second. While researching the issue, I noticed sitemap.xml error in GWT. Then I checked the XML site was, it was full of junk and corrupted. I have added /sitemap.xml in pages not to cached and cleared the cache, the XML got fixed. I have added

sitemap(-+([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+))?\.xml(.gz)?
sitemap(-+([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+))?\.html(.gz)?

in the 404 exception box. But, still got the 404 error. I did the setting on more time and saved it and cleared cache & purge CDN. I am not getting 404 error when I tested the sitemap.xml in GWT. But, still getting 404 error for all the child map inside.

My XML site map is https://volumewatchers.com/sitemap.xml and I seeing following in my .htaccess file `# BEGIN W3TC Skip 404 error handling by WordPress for static files
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(robots\.txt|sitemap(_index)?\.xml(\.gz)?|[a-z0-9_\-]+-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml(\.gz)?)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(css|htc|js|js2|js3|js4|html|htm|rtf|rtx|svg|svgz|txt|xsd|xsl|xml|asf|asx|wax|wmv|wmx|avi|bmp|class|divx|doc|docx|eot|exe|gif|gz|gzip|ico|jpg|jpeg|jpe|json|mdb|mid|midi|mov|qt|mp3|m4a|mp4|m4v|mpeg|mpg|mpe|mpp|otf|odb|odc|odf|odg|odp|ods|odt|ogg|pdf|png|pot|pps|ppt|pptx|ra|ram|svg|svgz|swf|tar|tif|tiff|ttf|ttc|wav|wma|wri|xla|xls|xlsx|xlt|xlw|zip)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [L]
</IfModule>
# END W3TC Skip 404 error handling by WordPress for static files`.

I would really appreciate your help on fixing the issue. The site traffic went down over 50%, now.

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/