How to Enable the Author Sitemap and Why Authors Are Excluded (Pro)

The Author Sitemap is a Pro feature that generates a dedicated sitemap listing your site’s author archive pages (e.g., example.com/author-sitemap.xml), the same way SureRank generates sitemaps for your posts and pages.

How to Enable It

1. Confirm SureRank Pro is active and licensed under SureRank → Tools → License.
2. Go to SureRank → Settings → Sitemap and make sure the main XML Sitemap toggle is turned on.
3. Turn on Enable Author Sitemap.

If the “Enable Author Sitemap” Toggle Doesn’t Appear

Go to SureRank → Settings → Advanced → Archive Pages and make sure “Remove Author Pages & Redirect to Home” is turned off.

The Author Sitemap can only be enabled if author archive pages themselves are enabled on your site. On a fresh install, “Remove Author Pages & Redirect to Home” is on by default, which redirects author pages to your homepage. This is the most common reason the toggle seems to be missing.

Why Some Authors Don’t Appear in the Sitemap

The Author Sitemap only lists authors who currently have at least one published post. This is expected behavior, not a bug. An author page with nothing published isn’t useful to include in a sitemap and can look like thin or low-value content to search engines.

An author will not appear if:

• They have no published posts (drafts, pending, or private posts don’t count), or
• All of their posts have been individually marked as No Index in SureRank’s SEO settings.

If a customer expects to see an author listed, first check whether that author has any live, indexable published content.

Interaction With Author Archive “No Index” Settings

There’s a separate setting that can affect the entire author sitemap: SureRank → Advanced→ Robot Instructions → No Index → Archives, where author archives can be set to No Index.

If author archives are set to No Index there, the Author Sitemap will be empty entirely. No author pages will be listed, even if authors have published posts. 

This is intentional: the sitemap won’t advertise pages you’ve told search engines not to index. Since this setting lives on a different screen than the sitemap toggle, it’s easy for a customer to enable the sitemap and still see it come up empty.

Troubleshooting Steps

1. General→ Sitemap: confirm XML Sitemap and Enable Author Sitemap are both on.
2. SureRank → Advanced → Archive Pages: confirm “Remove Author Pages & Redirect to Home” is off.
3. General → Meta Templates→ Archives: confirm Author archives are not set to No Index.
4. Confirm the author in question has at least one published post that isn’t marked No Index.
5. Visit /author-sitemap.xml on the site, or check /sitemap_index.xml for an author sitemap entry.

If That Doesn’t Work

If all the settings above are correct, the author has qualifying published content, and the sitemap is still empty or missing that author, please escalate this to our support team with the site URL and the author’s username so we can investigate further.