XML-Sitemap: 404 Errors

Hi Thomas,

1. (De)activating a plugin that utilizes WordPress’s rewrite rules, or having a plugin active that doesn’t follow the standards correctly, will cause pages registered via it to spawn and despawn sporadically — this includes and affects the WordPress sitemap. Resaving the permalink settings will rebuild the rewrite rules and should fix the issue immediately, but perhaps not permanently. Finding the cause is difficult without a deep understanding of these intricacies, but The SEO Frameworks’s sitemap should not be affected by these (in)congruencies.

2. The sitemaps are generated dynamically and should regenerate whenever you change general site settings or publish a new post. The WordPress Core sitemaps you use now do not come with caching and are regenerated whenever requested. If you use caching plugins, they might still cache the output of the sitemap, which might cause them to show outdated content. As such, it’s best to use TSF’s default sitemaps and exclude those from caching plugins.

3. Affixing the -1 i default WordPress behavior; you should not pursue changing this. It has zero effect on crawlability or usability; your users generally will not view the sitemaps, only robots.

4. Yes, by applying “noindex” to those pages, you will also exclude those from the sitemap. This also means those pages will disappear from search engine result pages.

I hope this helps ?? To learn more, please visit https://tsf.fyi/kb/sitemap.

Hi Sybre,

sorry for my late reply!

1. I am always a little nervous when it comes to hitting the permalink button because I am afraid it breakes the entire page. Will pressing the permalink button auto re-generate the xml-sitemap(s) in case I set certain pages/custom post types to index/noindex/404?

2. We indeed use WP Rocket but I did not find a reason why xml-sitemaps would be cached. So, as you say, all xml-sitemaps get re-generated as soon as someone posts or updates any wordpress post?

3. I know this has no impact. I were just confused why there is a “-1” at the end of every xml-sitemap’s name. Is there a certain reason for this? Do you do this in case there is another plugin in the way which also generates xml-sitemaps? In that case, you could just add something like “tsf” instead of “-1”, no?

4. Ok. So, just verify on 1. and I might go for it ??

Regards
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

1. Hitting “Save Changes,” even without changing anything, at /wp-admin/options-permalink.php will rebuild the permalink setting stored in the database. This will take into account all custom rewrite-registrations from plugins and the theme. It’s a safe way of “flushing” (refreshing) the permalink setting which tends to get messed up by various plugins and themes.

If anything breaks, albeit unlikely, it’s often custom post types or archives that become inaccessible. The plugin or theme registering those is then to blame registering its endpoints incorrectly, and you should contact their author(s) so they can rectify their mistake.

The permalinks setting gets flushed at various occasions beyond your intention, such as during a plugin update. Plugins and themes can control this behavior, and they’re notoriously known to do this incorrectly. The permalink settings often correct their mistake, albeit not always permanently.

2. I wrote the caching module in WP Rocket for TSF because of user demand; however, I do not believe it’s a better implementation than TSF has built-in, for that lives in a known and controlled environment.

3. The reason for the -1 affix in that WordPress’s Sitemap adds compulsory pagination. If it were to toggle pagination depending on how many posts there are, sitemaps without -1 will suddenly disappear when -1 is needed, and search engines will error out for they’ll get a 404-response for the vanished non--1 sitemap.

I hope this helps ?? Cheers!