Sitemap

Hi @jcbsep,

Thank you for reaching out.

We understand that you migrated your site to a new server and that you see that some posts having indexability issues in Google Search Console.

We had a quick check at the site URL you’ve provided, but do not see an immediate issue on the homepage or in your sitemaps.

Can you share a specific URL and the specific issue/warning Google Search Console gives? Can you share a screenshot? You can share a screenshot using a service like Snipboard.

Example: https://www.saberespractico.com/geografia/capitales/paises-y-capitales-de-oceania/

Google search warning issue: https://ibb.co/C9ywFcF

As you can see, the reference url is: https://www.saberespractico.com/deporte/paises-y-capitales-de-oceania/

I don’t even have that category selected for that post.

Hi @jcbsep,

Thank you for your reply.

The reference URL you see there is because the https://www.saberespractico.com/deporte/paises-y-capitales-de-oceania/ redirects to the page https://www.saberespractico.com/geografia/capitales/paises-y-capitales-de-oceania/.

Having said this, we don’t see any reason why the latter URL wouldn’t be able to be indexed by Google. The page does not have a noindex robots tag, is not excluded in the robots.txt file on your site and is included in your post-sitemap2.xml here.

Is this a new page? If so, we would just recommend waiting a bit to see if the page does get indexed by Google.

It’s not new. It’s around 10 years old. Top-ranked since then.

Hi @jcbsep,

Thank you for your reply.

In that case, there must be something else that changed your position or the indexation of this page that is unrelated to the server migration.

We did see that 2 comment pages are indexed and their canonical is also pointing at the actual page. This is also concerning. We would recommend to check what else might be off.

Unfortunately, your question is outside the scope of the support we provide. Giving?SEO advice, in most cases, requires a deep analysis of your site to provide accurate advice for your specific setup, even for what may seem to be a simple question.

At Yoast, we want to help people improve their site and to make SEO attainable for everyone. So we offer?Yoast Academy?courses on all aspects of SEO, several great plugins, and a?comprehensive SEO blog.?

We understand that not everyone has the interest or time to learn SEO.?Our main advice at this point?would be to check for a local SEO company and see if they can help out. If you are using a web development agency, you could ask them, as most agencies have at least a basic understanding of SEO as well – the good ones do.

Thanks @jeroenrotty

I’m taking care of it.

Do you know if the plugin has an option to create a new sitemap?

I disabled, cleaned cache and enabled sitemap again to create a new sitemap.

https://yoast.com/help/sitemap-does-not-update/

Is that enough?

@jcbsep If you are still experiencing an issue with the sitemap not updating after checking your caching settings, you can also force a cache reset by temporarily disabling the sitemap feature, and then re-enabling. To do so please perform the following steps:

?In WordPress go to SEO>General>Features
?For ‘XML Sitemaps’ Toggle the switch to ‘Disabled.’
??Click ‘Save Changes.’
?Toggle the switch back to ‘Enabled.’
?Click ‘Save Changes.’

?We also have a guide on how to enable/disable XML Sitemaps here: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/enable-xml-sitemaps-in-the-wordpress-seo-plugin/

Thank you Carl.

That’s what I did. Still not fixed though.

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/sitemap-97/#post-13478701

@jcbsep Thanks for your reply. We checked on your domain and it looks like you are using Cloudflare, so if the sitemap still isn’t updating as expected after forcing a cache reset it may be that it is being cache with Cloudflare.

Can you please try purging the cache for Cloudflare and let us know whether that resolves the issue? You can find instructions for this here: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169246-Purging-cached-resources-from-Cloudflare

@devnihil @jeroenrotty

On Google Site Tools it says that the url that I gave you as a exmaple is tagged as “nonindex” in the “robots” metatag.

https://ibb.co/gM78GCz

How this url can be tagged as noindex out of the blue after so many years? Where can I find those noindex tags? How Can I change it to index?

Ps. I did what you said. 1) Disable Yoast sitemap. 2) Purge cache (both from plugin and Cloudflare) 3) Make sure the url https://www.saberespractico.com/sitemap_index.xml was empty 4) Enable Yoast sitemap 5) Make sure it was working again 6) Purge carche again.

Just in case you wonder this might be a manual misconfiguration on my end:

https://ibb.co/Pcg07cL

@jcbsep We checked on the page https://www.saberespractico.com/geografia/capitales/paises-y-capitales-de-oceania/ and reviewed the source code and see that the robots meta tag output as the following:

<meta name=robots content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">

So we aren’t sure why Google Search Console is reporting the page as it being set to noindex (see image here).

Also, we reviewed your site’s robots.txt file, as well as checking the URL using cURL and confirmed that no X-Robots meta tag was being output in header.

There are a number of ways you can set pages to noindex, so we would recommend checking all of them. We would recommend checking to make sure the robots meta tag is NOT set to noindex for the page/post in Yoast SEO, and you can check this setting by performing the following actions:

? Go to the Edit screen for a page/post
? Scroll down to the Yoast Metabox
? Click on the ‘Advanced’ area
? For ‘Allow search engines to show this Page in search results?’ make sure this is set to ‘Yes’
Note (setting this value to Yes will set meta robots to index and setting No would set meta robots to noindex)

In addition, you can set pages/posts to be indexed by performing the following actions:

? In WordPress go to SEO>Search Appearance>Content Types
? For Pages set ‘Show Pages in search results’ to ‘Yes’
? Click ‘Save Changes’

Thank you for the implication Carl. I really appreciate it.

Settings are as you recommend. Not fixed though.

I will ask in Google forums too.

As a plan B I will use another plugin/tool for the sitemap and check if I fix the problem this way.

Very concerning though.

In any case, thank you so much for your help!

@jcbsep

We re-examined the issue with: https://www.saberespractico.com/geografia/capitales/paises-y-capitales-de-oceania/. We can see the URL is appearing as expected on the sitemap here https://www.saberespractico.com/post-sitemap2.xml. In this manner, Yoast is working correctly. There is nothing about the site or the URL or how Yoast is configured on the URL that would prevent Google from indexing it.

We think Google is confused. We suggest the following actions:

1. Clear all your caching from your theme, plugin, server, CDN like CloudFlare or browser. If you are not sure how to clear caching from theme/plugin please speak to those authors. If you want to clear cache from the server, please speak to your host provider. To clear the cache from a browser use this guide:?https://yoast.com/help/how-to-clear-my-browsers-cache/.

2. Delete your sitemap in Google. Doing so will not hurt the SEO of the site. This guide explains more (scroll to the bottom):?https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en.

3. Submit the sitemap again. Be sure to submit only sitemap_index.xml and nothing else.?This guide explains more:?https://yoast.com/help/submit-sitemap-search-engines/.

4. Monitor the results to see if the issue resolves and page gets indexed.

NOTE: If Google still does not index it, we can only suggest to contact Google for more information as Yoast is working correctly.