Google Does Not Like author-sitemap.xml Yoast Sitemap

Hello Ehasicka,

We are sorry and know it’s frustrating when Google reports that a sitemap cannot be fetched. From our end, the sitemap loads fine. Using a sitemap validator, the sitemap has no errors.

On checking your robots.txt file, there is a directive that may be the culprit:

Disallow: /author

Can you change that to see if the issue gets resolved? We see that you added the wrong sitemap URL. Though we consider it unnecessary to add the sitemap URL in the robots.txt file, your Yoast-generated sitemap is located at https://nexthomeresidential.com/sitemap_index.xml. Also, we usually recommended the default settings for the file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Do let us know how it goes.

Thank you for the quick comment, Maybellyne…

This suggestion uncovered an issue with the robots.txt file — the file in the root of the website is not getting updated by Settings > Reading Settings in WordPress. The correct changes I made in Settings > Reading Settings was not updating the root robots.txt

Any thoughts on that?

Anyhoo, I updated the root file manually and removed Disallow: /author and still no change.

Other ideas?

Thanks for following up.

I am not sure about changes made in Settings > Reading not reflecting in the robots.txt. Like I mentioned earlier, we recommend having a robots.txt file that is as clean as possible. Please refer to this article: https://yoast.com/wordpress-robots-txt-example/. To edit your robots.txt through our plugin, please follow this guide: https://yoast.com/help/how-to-edit-robots-txt-through-yoast-seo/

Regarding the author sitemap, since you have removed that directive, you may consider resubmitting the sitemap and observe for a couple of days for changes. It is usually not immediate.

Ok…let’s give it a few days.

Hi,

If you’ve made those changes to your robots.txt file, we do recommend removing and resubmitting the /sitemap_index.xml to Google Search Console and then monitoring it for changes in the coming days if it would then pick up and process the author sub-sitemap – https://yoast.com/help/submit-sitemap-search-engines/#google-remove

I did and it worked! Thank you for the guidance.

@ehasicka You’re welcome. If you should need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to let us know.