Google Sitemaps give errors - intermittently

[espmartin]

Hello,

I've created my Google Sitemaps per their guidelines, and they are fine for a few days in
Google's Webmaster control panel. But, each one will generate errors after a few days.

Error #1:

Sitemap not in supported format.

Error #2:

URL's not in supported format.

I've verified the sitemaps and they validate...

Here's the 1st few lines of 1 of my sitemaps:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
	<url>
		<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/</loc>
		<lastmod>2007-07-30</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>

So why does this happen? Again, they are FINE for a few days, and after resubmitting them,
they are OK, but after a few days... POOF!

Martin

[wige]

Looking at the full sitemap file, I see that some of the links are shown differently. Is the file being updated by an automatic process?

[espmartin]

Originally Posted by wige

Looking at the full sitemap file, I see that some of the links are shown differently. Is the file being updated by an automatic process?

With this site, it's all manual. I haven't realised that some urls are different...

Here's an example of errors:

 Errors
		Empty Sitemap
Your Sitemap does not contain any URLs. Please validate and resubmit your Sitemap.

This sitemap was fine when I re-submitted it. But now, 2 hours later, I get this?

[espmartin]

Still happening. Even with my sites that run the WordPress "Sitemap Generator" plugin...

Anyone else having this issue?

[seiretto]

Martin,

It sounds like google is picking up a emply sitemap.

Could there be an issue with your website or host?

Let me know your url including sitemap.xml page name, and I will have a look.

Dave.

[wige]

More critical, I can't access your home page (fiercestreetnetworks.com/) using the latest version of Firefox. I get an error message about a mismatched tag.

[espmartin]

WOW! I just found this out! (I'm not getting emails regarding new posts here???)
Site is fixed...
The url to the sitemap is: http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/sitemap.xml

Funny, what I've been doing is resubmitting the sitemaps within Webmaster tools,
and they check out fine for the first few days...

Today, one of my Wordpress blogs, with the auto-sitemap plugin working, got the
error too. Resubmitting it, and waiting an hour, Google says the sitemap is fine.

I bet by tomorrow it'll be errored!!!

[Webnauts]

espmartin I do not want to disappoint you, but your site map does not validate. You have in many illegal chars within your URLs.

[espmartin]

That's strange. I have not created one by hand, only had automated sitemap generators
create them. From the Wordpress Plugin, to one recommended by Google themselves!

Can someone post a "valid" sitemap, so I can cut/paste my info (about 20 sites!!!) into it?
I'll use it as a template.

[seiretto]

Originally Posted by espmartin

Can someone post a "valid" sitemap, so I can cut/paste my info (about 20 sites!!!) into it?
I'll use it as a template.

I assume (not checked, but seem to recall) a question mark character would return an error in a xml sitemap.

In several of your urls you have "?redirect_to". WHY!?? Google and anyone else will interpret this as spam.

Here is a valid sitemap:
http://www.seiretto.com/sitemap.xml

[espmartin]

Those redirects, they're from:
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/weblog/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/weblog/2007/06/06/new-blog-news/</loc>
That's my wordpress blog. Created by it's plugin!

[seiretto]

There is little benefit gained from automated sitemap generation apps as you only really need links to the main sections within your sitemap.xml, for many sites this maybe just a dozen links.

This has been highlighted in this forum many times, if your site has good internal links just add the main sections to your sitemap, see a post here:
SiteMap's Length !

You could take your generated sitemaps and manually edit them removing all the erroneous links out. There is no need to regenerate them every day, all you need to do is add a new link each time you create a NEW major section.

A sitemap has nothing really difficult to understand, the basics can be found here:
sitemaps.org - Protocol

[espmartin]

OK, here's the error:

  This Sitemap has the following errors.  
                       Errors            
    
  Empty Sitemap 
 Your Sitemap does not contain any URLs. Please validate and resubmit your Sitemap.

And here's my sitemap for this particular site:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<!-- Created by phpSitemapNG version 1.5.4b -->
<!-- Last update of sitemap 2007-07-07T13:52:17-05:00 -->
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:46-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/seo-articles/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:46-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/seo-articles/seo-news.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:46-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/website-promotion/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:46-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/website-promotion/article-submission-service.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:47-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/website-promotion/directory-submission-service.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:47-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://accessiblewebdesign-fsn.com/website-promotion/top-5-web-advertising-questions.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-07T13:51:46-05:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

This is just one error I constantly get.

Any help?

[wige]

How often do you update the sitemap? Also, are you only encountering problems with the sitemap in Google?

[espmartin]

Originally Posted by wige

How often do you update the sitemap? Also, are you only encountering problems with the sitemap in Google?

I update not very often on my fsn site (its the one sitemap example given), but very often
on my wordpress sites.

And yes, the only issue is w/Google's Webmaster tools. EVERY OTHER DAY!!! I get those errors
on all of my sitemaps! I "upload" them again, and Google checks them. After a FULL day of
them being "OK" w/Google (webmaster tools shows all my sites w/VALID maps for 1st few days),
but then - POW - errors!

[espmartin]

BTW Seiretto,

I've copied your sitemap, and meticulously replaced your URLs/info w/mine.

This will be the ultimate test

[seiretto]

Originally Posted by espmartin

I've copied your sitemap, and meticulously replaced your URLs/info w/mine.

Taking a quick look at the xml in your last sitemap there seems to be no problems there, so that may not change a thing.

I suspect its your website going offline, or not serving pages correctly! So when google attempts to revalidate the map your server is down (although it should try later!) or your server is returning no data (google just reads an empty sitemap file).

Use this to check when your site goes down:
Website Monitoring-InternetSeer Web site monitoring service

And if problems persist get a new host.

Note: if you want native traffic host in our native county.

Hope that helps

[espmartin]

RAR! I just switched hosts within the past week. I just got this:

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

That's the cut/paste. I'll double check w/hosting...

[seiretto]

you have garbaged the header! Change the top of the sitemap from this:

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

TO:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

And its fine.

So this time its a user error, as per norm for most computer errors! Dohhhhh....

[Webnauts]

To be up-to-date you can use the recommendation of Google and sitemaps.org:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
         http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
         xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

If you test your sitemap with validators they will give you an error like they do not recognize the shema, but you should ignore that.

Good luck.

[seiretto]

No, if you check his xml sitemap:
http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/sitemap.xml
it is [or at least was] showing the error described.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by seiretto

No, if you check his xml sitemap:
http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/sitemap.xml
it is [or at least was] showing the error described.

Because: http://www.w3.org/2001/03/webdata/xs...xml&style=xsl#

[Webnauts]

Which means, the <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> is missing at the top of the document.

[espmartin]

So, latest in all it's fullness:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
         http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
         xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/web-design-tips-tricks/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
    <url>
    <loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/web-design-tips-tricks/accessibility/web-accessibility/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/anti-virus/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
    <url>
    <loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/articles/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
    <url>
    <loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/free-downloads-online-tools/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
    <url>
    <loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/weblog/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/weblog/category/archived/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/getting-started-with-web-standards.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/web-design-tips-tricks/semantics/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/articles/article-archive.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-20T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/articles/advertising-articles.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-02T12:53:42+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.2</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/docs/gawds.php</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-08T11:24:27+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
    <url>
<loc>http://fiercestreetnetworks.com/web-site-advertising/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-01-04T19:16:05+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

It this errors again, what are my options? My hosting account shows GREAT uptimes, w/o
any timeout errors...

[Webnauts]

Espmartin the sitemap validates! HURRAY!

[espmartin]

Yes, now I just need to cut/paste my other 10+ sites to use this correct syntax!

Here's hoping that Google won't error it within the next day!