Sitemap question

[Marincky]

I have about 25 sites with sitemaps using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which I believe is Google friendly.

Recently about 3 or 4 of these sites keep showing back as having errors on the sitemaps, despite the fact that I am creating them exactly the same way I have always created them with no errors.

One of the site's is www.ukweddingstore.co.uk sitemap is www.ukweddingstore.co.uk/sitemap.xml

The error message is:

Unsupported file format
Your Sitemap does not appear to be in a supported format. Please ensure that it meets our Sitemap guidelines and resubmit.


If there are any experts out there that can help I would be very very grateful.

[Karen Mac]

Re: Sitemap reoccuring Error

Ramsey

Can you message me, or tell me where and exactly HOW you are getting this error?

Karen

[Karen Mac]

Re: Sitemap reoccuring Error

Just for the record I browsed around google and couldnt find any significant reasoning for this, but that its happening around and mentioned in several forums.

Reasons suggested:
Site down when gcrawler hit
host down when gcrawler hit
gcrawler ip is blocked on the server
google somehow corrupted the info or isnt able to read the info, or in short they screwed UP.

Id say wait a week or so before you get crazy, see if it resolves itself. Google has a habit of doing that.

Karen

[admarket]

Re: Sitemap reoccuring Error

I have about 25 sites with sitemaps using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which I believe is Google friendly.

Recently about 3 or 4 of these sites keep showing back as having errors on the sitemaps, despite the fact that I am creating them exactly the same way I have always created them with no errors.

One of the site's is www.ukweddingstore.co.uk sitemap is www.ukweddingstore.co.uk/sitemap.xml

The error message is:

Unsupported file format
Your Sitemap does not appear to be in a supported format. Please ensure that it meets our Sitemap guidelines and resubmit.


If there are any experts out there that can help I would be very very grateful.

I also use xml-sitemaps.com.

About 1 week after submitting my sitemap, Google Analytics said that there was 1 linkerror, because it was a re-direction url.

But I decided NOT to do anything about it, and the next day there weren't any errors at all.

So I guess, Google has a some kind of built-in analyzing filter, that will give a warning at first, but will then give 'the green light' after a second investigation.

Just my thoughts...

[Marincky]

Re: Sitemap reoccuring Error

I found out the problem to this but it wasn't a Google glitch. But it did eventually mean that around 15 of my own sites fell off the Google search engine overnight! However, problem solved now thanks to the tech team and I am gald to say Google put all my sites exactly where they all were before, within 2 hours of republishing, which was rather nice of them.

[AJ113]

Re: Sitemap reoccuring Error

Not sure if this is the same issue, but I added ten pages to one of my sites and resubmitted the site map. (On your advice as it happens Ramsey). My 23-page site, instead of going up to 33 went down to 13 indexed pages. This was ten days ago. It is only tonight that a few more indexed pages started to come back.

[Marincky]

Re: Sitemap reoccuring Error

Not sure if this is the same issue, but I added ten pages to one of my sites and resubmitted the site map. (On your advice as it happens Ramsey). My 23-page site, instead of going up to 33 went down to 13 indexed pages. This was ten days ago. It is only tonight that a few more indexed pages started to come back.

No that is not the same issue. When you resubmit a sitemap they can go down in number before they come back up.

One thing I will suggest however is opening up a notepad file, leaving it blank and naming it robots.txt Then place it in the root folder of your site via ftp. That is unless there are any pages you don't want the robots to text then ignore this advice.

Adrian I have emailed you