soyreinaldo

I completely understand your frustration because I had a very similar experience with Yoast SEO. The plugin caused all the pages on my website to be deindexed from Google due to a problem with the X-Robots-Tag: noindex header being applied to the sitemap. This issue completely wiped out my traffic and impressions on Google, leaving my website invisible to search engines.

What made it worse was that I had to manually request indexing for each URL in Google Search Console, which only allows 8 URLs per day, making it an incredibly slow and painful process to recover my site’s visibility.

Here’s everything I tried:

1. Checked my robots.txt file to ensure it wasn’t blocking anything.
2. Disabled SG Optimizer and cleared all server-side cache.
3. Modified the .htaccess file to force X-Robots-Tag: index, follow on the sitemap.
4. Verified the sitemap headers using cURL, which confirmed that the problem originated from Yoast SEO’s own code in the class-sitemaps.php file.

In the end, the only solution was to edit Yoast SEO’s core plugin file to fix the issue temporarily. However, I decided to migrate to Rank Math SEO, which has been much more reliable for sitemap generation and indexing.

If you’re still using Yoast SEO, I highly recommend switching to Rank Math SEO and clearing your entire cache after uninstalling Yoast to avoid lingering issues. Since switching, my sitemap headers are correct, and I haven’t had any further indexing problems.

Yoast SEO might be popular, but this kind of issue is unacceptable, especially for websites that rely on Google traffic. Save yourself the frustration and move to a better solution like Rank Math.