[Official] Complete Rank Math Tutorial 2026 - SEO Tutorial For Beginners (Step-by-Step)!

Key Takeaways

hi i'm kate welcome to rankmath's complete installation and setup tutorial we are proud to call rankmath the swiss army knife of seo because it allows you to completely customize your search engine optimization settings we'll cover all the steps to install ranked math seo and configure it to fit your needs use the timestamps in this video's description to jump to specific topics installing the plugin going through the setup wizard performing a complete seo analysis to find ways of improving your website getting to know the features general settings titles and meta optimizing a post and the status and tools section we will cover features from both the free and pro version if you don't have ranked math pro you can skip the parts that talk about it and only concentrate on the options available for free now let's install ranked math on your website the plugins free version can be installed through two methods from the wordpress repository or uploading it manually however the pro version can only be downloaded from our website and uploaded manually to install rank math through the wordpress repository from within your website access the plugins section of the wordpress panel click on add new and the add plugins page will open with a search field on the right you can just type in ranked math and you'll see the results click on the install button next to rank map in just a few seconds the installation button will change to an activate button you must click on it to complete the installation once the plugin is activated you'll be redirected to a page with a link for you to connect your rank math account we'll make that connection right after we cover the installation through file uploads you can download the plugins free version from wordpress.org or rankmath.com but the pro version is exclusively available on rankmath.com once you're logged in the initial dashboard will show product downloads with a link to download the zip file that contains the latest version of ranked math return to your wordpress dashboard and open the plugins section click on add new and when the page opens click on the upload plugin button at the top of the page right next to the title a new panel will open where you can drag and drop the file or you can click on the browse button and locate the plugin in your hard drive you can just upload the pro version even if you don't have the free version we will install both ranked math seo and rank math pro when you select the file its name will appear on the page click on install now to upload the file and install it wordpress will finish the upload and unzip it once the process is finished you'll see the following screen click on the activate plugin button and you'll be taken to the setup wizard where you can connect your account if the free version was already installed and configured you'll be redirected to the wordpress plugin screen where you'll be able to see that rank math has been successfully installed if there's a notice for you to activate rank math pro on the top of the page click on it to go to the login page and connect your account then return to the plugins list and click on setup wizard we encourage you to create a rank math account even if you're using the plugins free version because this gives you access to additional features these include analytics data right in your wordpress dashboard and our site-wide in-depth seo analysis as well as on-page seo perks like automatic suggestions of keywords to optimize your content and five free credits from the content ai analysis which analyzes your focus keyword with the data from existing search results to give intelligent suggestions fitted for your content you can create an account by clicking on register now and using your facebook google wordpress.com or email account after finishing the installation it's time to set up the plugin the fastest way to do that is through the setup wizard if it doesn't open automatically you can access it through the plugins page or rinkmathzone dashboard to open the dashboard click on ranked math in the left sidebar of your wordpress admin panel the same option is available in the quick actions menu at the top bar open the setup wizard which is on the top of the dashboard right after modules and help the setup wizard starts with a choice to use the plugin in easy or advanced mode which will influence how much you can customize it in easy mode you can add the custom information for your website and connect to google services through rank math to make the most of our analytics feature if you're using advanced mode you'll also find settings for site maps and some seo tweaks and after you're done there will be a link to set up advanced options rank math pro business and agency users also have a third option importing settings from other websites where they've already had great results with rank math this will not import the metadata only the plugin settings that you had customized this can save a lot of time for anybody who works regularly with client websites when you select this option a browse button will appear select the file and click on upload then you can carry on with the rest of the setup wizard normally if you see an error message saying that the file is not permitted for security reasons we recommend downloading the file upload types plugin and adding the txt format or contacting your hosting company once you've defined the mode click on start wizard for this tutorial we're going to use the advanced mode if you're not sure how you want to set up now don't worry all of these options are accessible from your wordpress admin area if you switch to ranked math from another seo plugin we will detect the data in your server and the following screen will be import for previous geos users this includes data from yoast premium such as redirections and local news and video seo you can select which settings will be imported then click on the start import button when the import is over the progress bar will show 100 completed you can click on continue to carry on with the rest of the settings however we recommend opening a few pages and posts to check if the data was correctly imported in the post editor after the process is complete moving on to your site where you'll start by defining the type of website you're operating so we can make that clear for search engines if you've imported settings from another plugin many of the fields will already be filled out the first option will dictate the others telling rankmath what the website is all the options can be classified into two categories personal or business the first category includes personal blog portfolio or other personal website the second is for community blogger news site small business webshop or other types of business websites this defines the schema types that rank math will use to give context about your website to search engines in case you don't know what schema is we will cover it later in this tutorial it will also affect the options offered by rank math for instance adding local seo schema to commercial websites we will also cover these options later the first two settings logo for google and default social share image are available for all types including personal blog portfolio or other personal websites logo for google is what would appear in the knowledge graph alongside other information about your website or business however when your website or business starts appearing in the knowledge graph is up to google's discretion once you've uploaded the logo you will find it just below the option itself the minimum supported resolution is 160 by 90 pixels and the maximum supported resolution is 1920 by 1080 pixels if you have a square variation of your logo we recommend using that default social share image is what would appear when visitors share a page that doesn't have a featured image or any images in the content if you don't define one the image section of your post will be empty when it's shared on facebook the recommended resolution is 1200 by pixels meanwhile community blog or news small business webshop and other business website have two more options the first business type is a comprehensive list of work areas that you can browse through or type to search if the website doesn't fit into any of them select organization then comes company name which rank math will have already filled out with the current name of your website if that's different from your organization you should change it the next step is analytics when you'll connect to google services through rank math to make the most of our analytics panel click on connect google services and you'll be redirected to a page where you'll choose an account to continue after selecting your account you'll have to provide rank math the required permissions so we can display the reports in your wordpress admin panel we do not store any of the data from your google account on our servers everything is processed and stored on your server we take your privacy extremely seriously and ensure it is never misused the three required permissions are to see and download your google analytics data to view and manage search console data of your verified sites and to let ranked math manage the list of sites and domains that you control if you're a ranked math pro user rank math will also ask permissions for creating a new google analytics account with its default property in view editing google analytics management entities and viewing your adsense data on the next page click on allow once again to confirm your choices for permissions now that rank math is connected with your google account you'll be redirected back to the setup wizard where you can choose the account used for each one if you don't have a property for this site in google search console we will create it for you rank math pro users can choose a country to see the statistics for in ranked maths analytics google analytics is set up in the next section you can choose your account property and view just as with search console rank math pro users can filter the analytics data for a specific country if you're not using any other plugin or theme to add the google analytics code to your website enable the install analytics code option if you do have a plugin or theme that has already added this code enabling this option would make us add the same code for the second time so you should consider which plugin you would like to use to add the google analytics tracking code to your website connecting to the last google service adsense is a rank math pro feature if you're using rank math pro just select your account on the bottom of the page you can activate the option email reports to receive seo reports about how your website is performing in google straight to your inbox the data in these reports shows real opportunities to improve your website's seo we'll discuss this feature in detail when we talk about the analytics module use the timestamps in the description to jump to it some options only appear if you're using the setup wizard in advanced mode let's cover those sitemaps are lists of links to pages and media in your website that you submit to search engines in the setup wizard you can allow ranked math to create site maps and define the basic settings to include images or not and which post types and taxonomies will have site maps if you have imported data from another plugin where there were specific site maps such as news or video you can also define if they'll keep their sitemaps and which post types will enter the sitemap for that content because sitemaps are a crucial seo resource we'll cover them thoroughly when we talk about ranked maths modules if you want to skip to that now use the timestamps in the description rank math chooses the best options by default so you can leave this as it is if you're not sure of what to select here moving on to optimization where we will customize a few of the options from rank math's general settings that only appear in the advanced mode the first no index empty category in tag archives tells search engines that the archives of tags and categories not used in any posts or pages shouldn't be added to their index consequently these pages should not be considered for ranking in search results for example if all of a website's posts are categorized the automatically created uncategorized category would have thin content which means no useful content pages like that can harm the reputation of your website as a whole affecting the ranking of other pages the second nofollow external links adds the nofollow mate attack to other websites this tag tells search engines to not visit the pages or establish any relationship between your site and the destination as a general rule of thumb using nofollow tags on the external links reflects badly on a website because external links should be resources where readers could learn more about the subject so having no follow would mean that the links were not researched properly or that they're not taking the reader to credible sources we recommend using nofollow only for affiliate links which we will learn how to do in the general settings section of this video you can skip to that part with the timestamps in the description third and last open external links in new tab or window makes all links to other websites open in new tabs or windows even if the option open link in a new tab in the page editor is deactivated the setup wizards ready screen is a confirmation page that you have completed the steps until now we recommend enabling the auto update feature so you can stay on the best and latest version of rank math always keeping up with the changes in google's algorithm there are other five useful links our tutorial about on-page seo which we will cover later in this video our youtube channel which you should subscribe to by the way in case you haven't already our free facebook group where you can meet other seos and ask questions the knowledge base where we have articles about each and every feature of the plugin and a link to our support channel where you can open a ticket in case no articles cover what your website is going through our team is happy to provide support to all ranked math users regardless of whether they use the free or pro version pro users also have access to additional and personal help if you're using advanced mode you'll find a button to set up advanced options which has three new tabs role manager 404 in redirections and schema markup the role manager allows you to use wordpress roles to control which of your site users can edit or view specific settings in ranked math it's useful for websites that have multiple people working behind the scenes but if that's not your case you can turn it off we'll get into more details regarding the roles and settings further down the tutorial use the timestamps in the description in case you wish to skip to that part in the next page you can activate two features of ranked math that we'll cover in the modules portion of this video the 404 monitor and redirections the 404 monitor gives you an overview of your entire website's 404 page not found errors we recommend activating the feature so you don't miss any errors redirections is the module where you set up new destination pages for any urls on your website for example the pages that present 404 errors the last tab is where you can activate schema or structured data this is metadata about pages and posts specifically formatted for search engines so they understand the context of your content we will explain what schema is and how rankmath adds schema markup to your website in the module section of this video you can skip to that part with the timestamps in the description with the plugin installed and set up we can start with one of rankmath's best features an in-depth site-wide analysis to show you what can and what must be improved keep in mind that to run the seo analysis tests your website needs to be connected to your freerankmath.com account if you don't find the seo analysis link in rank math's menu you need to go to rinkmath's dashboard and activate the seo analysis module then click on the start sitewide analysis button at the top of the page this whole process takes a few seconds when it's done there will be charts at the top of the page with the seo score and a quick summary of any issues found the first column past tests shows how many aspects of your website don't need fixing the second warnings regards the issues that are not very severe but deserve attention the third and last one failed tests is about serious problems that need to be fixed immediately these aren't side breaking issues your site still works but they are problematic from an seo perspective there are more detailed results in each test the ones you pass will have a green check mark while warnings will have a yellow exclamation point and failed tests will have a red x if you only see 21 tests check if you're using the plugin in easy mode all of the 29 tests will only appear if it's in advanced mode the tests are divided into four sections basic seo advanced seo performance and security some of them apply to the entire website while others are focused on the home page you can apply these tests to other pages with the free seo analyzer tool in ranked maths website the link is in this video's description starting with basic seo which regards the foundational aspects of your website eight tests are related to the home page a list of the keywords that rank math most found in your home page and if that group of words is cohesive making the intent of the website clear if the home page has an seo description and if it's too long to appear fully in search results if the page has an h1 heading which is the text that usually houses your page title in the front end if there are h2 headings to organize your homepage in sections if the same keywords are present in both the title and the description how many internal and external links exist on your homepage to analyze the ratio or proportion between them if the homepage's seo title is of an appropriate length because if it's too long it will be cut off and if the images in your webpage have alt tags we'll explain what these tags are and how you can add them automatically with rank math when we cover the image seo module use the timestamps in the description if you'd like to skip to that part the other five tests are related to the website as a whole if your website's tagline which appears next to the home page title is still set to the default just another wordpress site make sure to change it in wordpress's general settings because keeping it like that means wasting an opportunity to show what your website is about in the header of the homepage which would be great for a ceo it also makes your website an easy target for hackers any hacker with wordpress exploit can locate your site in seconds and they usually attack hundreds of sites at a time the block public test refers to the option from wordpress's reading settings called search engine visibility activating it discourages search engines from indexing the site as it says many times this was enabled before the website was ready and continued like that because nobody remembered to deactivate it permalink structure checks if the structure of the url for each post and page on your website is still the default that came in wordpress's permalink settings a question mark p equals a number this isn't good because there's no keyword information for your visitors or search engines moreover the default structure makes urls hard to remember in the last two basic seo tests rank math counts how many posts don't have a focus keyword then among the ones that do it checks whether each post's focus keyword is present in its title we recommend first adding the keywords to the posts that don't have them in place then running the seo analyzer again next is the advanced seo section with 11 tests let's begin with the ones that only apply to the home page in the first two rank math gives you a preview of how your homepage appears in the search results on desktop and mobile devices then comes mobile snapshot which isn't technically a test it shows you how the homepage looks on a mobile screen to help you identify if your website is actually mobile friendly the canonical tag test analyzes if the home page has self-canonical tags pointing to itself rank math will check if the home page has the new index robots made attack added to it which would tell search engines not to add the page to their indexes consequently eliminating the chances of it ever ranking let's skip to open graph meta which will test the markup created by facebook that formats your homepage to be shared on social networks skipping again to schema metadata which searches for the chunks of code that help search engines understand the web and your website better now we'll cover the tests that apply to the whole website www canonicalization test checks if urls with www direct to urls without it or vice versa depending on how you set up your website google considers urls with and without www to be two different pages so you need to make it clear which of them is the true url to avoid duplicate indexing rank math looks for a robots.txt file at the root of your web server which directs search engines on what they should or should not crawl this type of file uses allow and disallow commands to tell bots if they can crawl directories or files since the standard behavior for bots is to crawl most of the times you'll use disallow allow is useful when you want some files or a subdirectory which is a folder in that folder to be crawled in wordpress disallow is used for the administrative area by default but you can always use it for specific folders or directories that don't show up in search results if the plugin finds a disallow tag it will show a warning so you can check if that content really shouldn't be crawled you can make changes to the robots.txt file from the wordpress admin area with rank math as we'll see in the modules section of this video use the timestamps in the description if you want to skip to that part the search console test checks if the website is connected to google search console formerly known as google webmaster tools to pass this test you need to create a rank math account and connect to your website with google services through rank math the last of the advanced seo tests checks if your website has a sitemap file the third section performance has six tests regarding the home page's speed since this has become a significant ranking factor in the last couple of years the first image headers expire tells your visitor's browser how long the images in that page should be stored in cache for rank math searches for expires in your image headers when the element expires the browser needs to load it again most caching plugins add this to your images the following two tests minify css and minify javascript check if the css and javascript files are compressed to occupy less space what's also known as minification this can also be fixed with a caching plugin the fourth test is page objects which counts the number of requests made to your server in that particular page there is no established baseline on what the number of requests should be but the lower the better because each one takes valuable loading time your homepage passes the test if there are less than 20 requests in the fifth performance test rank math calculates the total size of the page's html you pass the test if the size is less than 50 kilobytes the last test in the performance section is about your server's response time the biggest factor is the host itself but if you can't change hosting companies we recommend using a content delivery network also known as cdn that serves files from different servers across the globe this usually helps improve the response time or at least ease the load on your servers last but not least are the security tests they start with visible plugins which checks if any plugins used in your website are exposed in the code this is valuable information for hackers if they spot a plugin with a security breach it will be used as an entry point to invade your website the free security plugin hide when wp ghost hides this information from hackers then comes the same test for your theme rank math tries to identify if your theme's name can be discovered by theme detectors or other tools the directory listing test checks if the names of the files and folders that make your website are visible for everybody to see which is not safe if they are you should contact your hosting provider and ask them to turn this off and finally insecure connection rankmath looks for the https protocol in your connection failing this test means that the website uses unsecured connections which is a red flag for search engines as well as your visitors we recommend that you switch to https quickly or contact your web host if you don't know how now that we've gone over your website's primary needs let's get to know ranked math's features so you can make the most out of the plugin we'll start in rank math dashboard it has three tabs if you use the plugin in easy mode modules help and setup wizard if you use the advanced mode there is a fourth import and export it's a shortcut to the import and export tab of rank math status and tools section in case you'd like to learn about it now use the timestamp in the description to jump straight to it for now we will go through the first tab modules rank math has two modes easy and advanced like we saw in the beginning of the setup wizard you can easily switch modes in the upper right corner the easy mode benefits beginners who want to let us do all the heavy lifting seo work following the best practices the advanced mode is for users who wish to have full control over their website's seo many options are available only when you enable it you don't need to be in advanced mode to use the options from the modules so you can just activate them and return to easy mode however some of the modules have options that only appear in advanced mode so that's the one we'll use for the rest of this tutorial some modules appear in the left sidebar of the wordpress panel when you activate them in the toggle let's start by covering the modules that don't require additional plugins then the ones that do in alphabetical order starting with the 404 monitor which gives you an overview of your entire website's 404 page not found errors this feature has two modes simple and advanced the simple mode groups 404 errors by uri which means uniform resource identifier you will find two other columns hits which is the number of times the error causing uri was accessed and access time that captures the time of the latest hit on the uri the advanced mode shows 404 errors individually with more details first the referrer field shows the url for the page that contains the wrong link even if it belongs to another website second the user agent column shows the browser where the error happened but now you can notice that the last column hits shows numbers with links by clicking on the number you'll see a filtered list with only the errors for that uri it's important to consider carefully before switching from easy to advanced mode because it might increase your error log significantly the mode is also defined in the settings which you can access in the general settings section of rank math you can also define a limit for the number of errors shown in the log and enter uris or keywords you wish to prevent from getting logged by the 404 monitor the last setting ignore query parameters tells the monitor to ignore the part of the url that comes after a question mark if you see a lot of errors in the log file that have the same url but different query parameters you can enable this to have a cleaner log the analytics module helps you connect rank math with google services to see the most important statistics directly in your wordpress dashboard to use this feature you'll need to connect your website to your rank math free account and then make the connection to the google services if you want to follow the tutorial for either of these steps use the time stamps in this video's description to go back to create your rank math account or the analytics section of the setup wizard now let's browse through the analytics section it has six tabs the dashboard site analytics seo performance keywords rank tracker an exclusive feature for rank math pro business and agency users and index status the dashboard is where you'll see an overview of your current seo standing and also your immediate seo progress start by defining a time frame for rank map to pull data from google search console keep in mind that search console only begins recording data after you've set it up the first card you'll see on the screen is the overall optimization chart which gives you an overview of the optimization of your posts based on the seo score assigned by rank math we will learn all about on-page optimization later in this tutorial if you click on open report the site analytics tab will open we will cover it in a few moments the seo performance overview gives you a quick update on your search traffic overall impressions total number of keywords you're ranking for and the average position the open report link will take you to the seo performance tab which we will cover in a bit rank math pro users have access to the keyword report overview a summary of the top winning keywords meaning the keywords for which your posts have most gone up in the rankings and top losing keywords the ones for which your posts have most gone down in search results since ranked math pro also offers a keyword tracker this report has a separate tab for showing the top winning and losing tracked keywords all ranked math users have access to the keywords position report which gives you a quick picture of the best and worst ranking in the search results based on keywords your site is ranking for both of these cards have links to the keywords tab which we will learn about in a few minutes ranked math pro has another exclusive feature a list of the top 5 winning and losing posts from across your website this means the posts that have gone up and down the most positions in search results during the last 30 days you can choose which data will appear in the table the position in the search results the search traffic which means all the traffic generated on your website from search results including the actual results and also any additional page views that those clicks generated the amount of impressions which means how many people saw the pages in search results how many clicks your posts and pages got in search results the average click-through rate which is the percentage of clicks in the impressions and the graph with the position history so you can analyze if any changes you made had a positive or negative impact if there are too many columns and some of them don't appear try sliding the table to the right the columns should be there site analytics is a ranked math pro feature that combines data from rank math google analytics and google search console to help you direct your seo efforts towards the most important posts on your website this starts by showing an overview of how many posts on your website are well optimized and you can look up a particular page by entering the url or typing the title the link will appear right below the search box and when you click on it a page with the post statistics will appear you can filter by the score or even by the posts without data which are the ones that still don't have a focus keyword we recommend having focused keywords on all the posts so ranked math can calculate their seo score to make sure you're not missing any opportunities you can click on the title of any post listed here and it will open a new section in the beginning of the page where you can find detailed information it begins with the rank math seo score and the ranked math seo analyzer score the difference between those is that the ranked math seo score is based on the tests you'll find in ranked math's meta box when you edit your content while the seo analyzer score is calculated from all the tests performed with rank math the co analyzer tool the same tests that were performed on your homepage in the seo analysis module that we covered keeping in mind that the goal here is to optimize the most accessed content the top right corner has four badges which will indicate if that's among the five posts with the most searched traffic in the entire website the most search impressions most clicks and most ranked keywords there will be a number for the rank within the metric there are also numbers for the page's loading speed on desktop and mobile devices and how the primary keyword has been trending on google searches the graph underneath includes additional data about your post from search console and google analytics last but not least there's a table with all the keywords your post is currently ranking for and their respective ranking data this is especially useful when posts are ranking between the 11th and 20th position for a high volume keyword it's a lot faster to break into top 10 results which means the first result page by optimizing this post rather than writing a new post and trying to get it ranked then you'll find a list of all your blog posts pages products and custom post types in a table that you can filter by post type in the table you will also find the seo score schema type and links from the page to other pages within the website in other websites and how many pages in your site link to that one you can also include some of the metrics that we just presented in the dashboard impressions search traffic clicks position and position history the next tab is seo performance a report with six different metrics for your selected time frame the total search traffic which means the traffic generated on your website from search results including the actual results and also any additional page views that those clicks generated the number of times your website appears when people search your focused keywords the total number of keywords your website is ranking for the number of times people saw your links in search pages and clicked on them the percentage of people that saw your result and clicked and last but not least the average ranking of your website's pages taking all of the keywords into account rank math pro includes the latest updates to google's algorithm in the graph this can show you if a particular update impacted your site's performance so you can adjust the seo strategy the changes that have been confirmed by google will have a green confirmed notice since google makes thousands of updates every year and does not comment on them unless they have a significant impact on the search results we will also signal when search engine result pages tracking tools have picked up on strong signals of fluctuation in the results you can click on read more to learn all we know about each potential update under the graph there is a table with the five posts that have most gone up and down in the rankings alongside the current position is that statistic in the beginning of the time period for comparison on the end of the page is the same table with all of the website's content that you'll find in the site analytics tab you can click on the title to open the specific data for that page the keywords tab helps you track the ranking or the position of your website in the search engines besides giving an overview rank math provides two tables one with the top five winning and losing keywords and another with the rest of them monitoring the winning and losing keywords can show you opportunities or potential pitfalls beforehand so you can come up with an appropriate course of action when you click on a word you will see all of the posts that appear in the search results for that keyword while you shouldn't have more than one post with the same primary keyword the same keyword could play a minor role in several posts ranked math pro users will see an additional tab rank tracker no keywords will be there the first time you visit this tab and there are three ways to add them the fastest way is with auto ad focus keyword which will import focus keywords from all your existing posts and automatically add the focus keywords used on your new posts to add words individually you either need to use the add button on the top of the table or open the keywords tab to add from the tables by clicking on the plus sign in the beginning of each line the rank tracker will monitor and record their performance so you know which keywords are working for you better than others both in and out of your website on the top of the page there will be a graph with the history of your keyword rankings so you can track their progress over time you can add or remove data by clicking on the small graph icon to the left when the keyword is on the graph the icon will be green instead of gray when the cursor hovers there a button with a trashcan icon will appear that's what you use to remove words from the tracker since this tool works retroactively because it pulls from the analytics data you can add and delete keywords when you need to the ranking history will always be for the period you select on the analytics settings which we will cover next by default the tables show your ranking keywords at first and the ones that don't appear on the search results towards the end but you can always click on the columns to sort the table as you require now let's check out the index status tab rank math will update the index status every time it fetches new data from google analytics and google search console which is every 7 days for free users and three days for pro users currently free users have a limit of 2000 urls and pro users have a limit of 6 000 urls that will be fetched in each schedule we'll begin with the index statuses shown in rank math and what they correspond to in google search console rank math pro users will find an overview of the index status of the pages overall in top statuses the number of pages under each status appears when you hover your mouse over the pie chart as well as listed on the right unspecified corresponds to no data available which can happen sometimes if google hasn't crawled this page yet pass means valid pages which are the pages that are valid and have been indexed without issues or warnings partial corresponds to valid with warning these pages have been indexed but have issues that could lead to bad results if the warnings are ignored fail means error these are the pages that haven't been indexed because something's wrong and need your immediate attention later in this tutorial we'll go over specific error type descriptions at each page so you can know what's happening and how to fix it excluded corresponds to excluded from indexing this status includes those urls that are deliberately excluded from indexing by you or the ones with duplicate content next it's time to go over some of the most common status reasons you can check out the knowledgebase article that corresponds to this video for a full list of statuses rankmathpro users will find them listed in the presence on google card submitted and indexed implies that the url you've submitted through the sitemap was successfully indexed index not submitted in sitemap are the urls google discovered through means other than the sitemap which have been indexed url is unknown to google indicates that google hadn't discovered this url before and hasn't crawled it yet crawled currently not indexed means that google has decided not to index the page for now discovered currently not indexed indicates that google has discovered the page and even wants to crawl it but doing that could have caused an overload on the site so google has rescheduled the crawl submitted url marked no index indicates that you've submitted a page for indexing however something on the page like a new index meta tag or http header instructs google not to index this page index though blocked by robot.txt is for pages that your robot.txt blocked google from crawling but were linked to on another site so even though google respects the robots.txt file it's managed to index this page anyway it's also possible to just get blocked by robots.txt which means the page hasn't been indexed because of the rules in the robots.txt file so first you need to check by going to your website robots.txt or use google's robots testing tool which we've linked in the description if you want the page to be indexed you can check if the rules were written with rink math's general settings in the robots.txt tab if they weren't you'll need to make changes to the file via ftp if you don't want the page to be indexed instead of trying to block indexing with robots.txt you need to set the page to no index open rank maths metabox in your page editor of choice and go to the advanced tab then select no index in the robot's meta tag area and update the page if you can't find the advanced tab in the meta box make sure that the plugin is in advanced mode on the upper right corner of the dashboard if your sitemaps were created with ranked math sitemap module once you set the page to no index it will be excluded from the sitemap four of the statuses are related to canonical tags these tags tell search engines what url to index in two cases first when the same page can be reached by different addresses for example with and without www second when pages have very similar content rank math adds a self-canonical tag by default to all pages but you can assign a new address through the meta box in your page editor of choice open the advanced tab paste the url in the canonical url field and update the page if you can't find the advanced tab in the meta box make sure that the plugin is in advanced mode on the upper right corner of the dashboard if your sitemaps were created with ranked math site map module once you add a canonical tag the duplicate page will be excluded from the site map alternate page with proper canonical tag means that google has recognized the canonical tag and sees this page as a duplicate duplicate without user selected canonical suggests that google has recognized this page and several other similar pages as duplicate but none of them include the canonical we recommend explicitly marking the canonical page duplicate google chose different canonical than user denotes that you've marked this page as canonical but google thinks another page could be a better choice for the page that will be indexed duplicate submitted url not selected as canonical is shown when you don't use the canonical tag to indicate which url should be indexed google will define which page to index on its own and the duplicates will show this error all rank math users will see a table with all the pages posts and custom post types in the website and the individual index status of posts rank math pro users can filter the posts by their index status using the drop down menu at the top when you select a specific status you'll be able to see all the posts that share the same index status pro users also have advanced index stats which we'll cover in detail later all users can choose which columns to display to keep the table clutter free to add or remove columns click on the three horizontal dots that you see in the top right and choose the columns you prefer some information is available exclusively for pro users the overall index status in the status column as well as the columns crawled as which indicates if the user agent that google crawled this page with was a mobile or desktop device and robot state which shows whether the page is blocked for calling or not the other columns are available for all users indexing aloud indicates whether the page has an index or no index meta tag mobile usability checks whether the page clears the mobile usability test or not rich results indicates the rich snippets that google has detected on the page and page fetch indicates whether google could retrieve their page from the server rank math presents all the data in the table with a color code so you can understand the status of each page quickly a green stamp with a tick means pass an orange stamp with a tick means partial a red stamp with an x means fail and a gray stamp with the question mark means unspecified rank math pro users can dive deep into the indexing metrics and results for each post by clicking on the indexing status under its title new fields will appear verdict provides information on whether the submitted page is indexed or not robot's text state indicates whether or not the page is blocked to google by a robot's txt rule depending on whether your robot's txt file restricts the crawling of this page you'd see one of three values the two first allowed and disallowed correspond to the commands in the file third comes unspecified which means that the page wasn't fetched or found or that the robot's gxt file itself couldn't be reached indexing state shows there's a no index meta tag or http header blocking indexing this field can show unspecified indexing allowed blocked by meta tag or blocked by http header last call time shows the last time this url was crawled by google using the primary crawler whether it's mobile or desktop this result won't be available if the page still hasn't been crawled successfully the pagefetch state indicates whether googlebot was able to retrieve the page from your server or not there are several possible values unknown fetch state successful fetch 401 blocked due to unauthorized request 403 block due to access forbidden 404 not found soft 404 blocked due to other code 4 issues that are neither 403 or 404 blocked by robots.txt server error which would be a code 5 followed by two other numbers redirection error internal error and invalid url the next field google canonical indicates the canonical url that google has selected for the page if the page isn't indexed this result will be available on the other hand the user canonical field indicates the canonical url that you've explicitly declared on the page if the page doesn't include a canonical tag this result will be unavailable but like we mentioned earlier ranked math would automatically add self-referencing canonical tags for all pages that are set as index you can check whether the page is set to index or no index in the advanced tab of rank math's metabox so you should probably find the post's own url here sitemaps will show any known sitemaps that point to this page that were submitted to google through the search console or listed down in the robots.txt file any sitemap discovered through other means would not be listed in referring urls you can find urls that google possibly use to discover this page the referring page might have a direct link to this page or through a chain of linked pages an empty field here just means that the referring pages may be unaccessible or that the url inspection api was unable to pull this information for now moving on to crawled as which shows if the primary crawler that google has used to crawl this page was desktop or mobile mobile usability result tells you whether the page is mobile friendly or not since not all pages are tested for mobile usability besides a pass or fail you might also find not available as a value here rank math also displays any issues that might be hindering the page from being optimized for mobile devices last but not least rich result types shows the rich results analysis information that was formatted to appear directly in search result pages such as breadcrumbs or frequently asked questions if there are no rich results found you'll see it as absent now that you know how the feature works let's take a look at the settings they're in the general settings section of rank math in the analytics tab rank math pro business and agency users can choose a specific country for search console and analytics in the search console section you can activate the index status option to see that tab in analytics in analytics all users can install analytics code if they're not using any other plugin or theme to add the google analytics code to their website if you do have a plugin or theme that has already added this code enabling this option would make us add the same code for the second time like we mentioned in the setup wizard so you should consider which plugin you'd like to use for this rank math also gives all users the option of excluding logged in users from analytics data pro users also have the options to anonymize all of their visitors ip addresses and have a self-hosted analytics.js file which boosts the speed of your website because it hosts the google analytics script locally and uploads it every 12 hours this means you no longer need to send requests to google for an external js file all rank math users can define how long we should keep the data that we download from google analytics in your database rank math free users have a maximum of 90 days keep in mind that the data is stored twice so differences can be properly calculated it's also possible to delete data which only applies to the data from google we have copied to your server you can delete the data if you want to start fresh or if you're running out of space and update data manually which downloads data from google when you click on it if you have chosen to retain 90 days of data in your analytics database we estimate that your data will be imported in 17 minutes if you have more data it will take more time