I cannot get my sitemap approved. I get an error suggesting to comply with google's standard. I've renamed the sitemap, I've coppied/pasted tutorial site maps, I've done everything possible. So, I now have 3 sitemaps laying in my root directory.. I doubt any of my pages will get indexed... Is this common?
I had this happen to me once. My problem was that the sitemap file was not saved in UTF-8 format. I would check that.
did you follow the google sitemap guidelines ? if not then that is the case, however there are many free tools out there, which helps you to create the sitemaps for google, check anyone of them.
Did you ever get this one figured out blackcamaro? I'm always interested in hearing what the fixes are for this sort of thing.
Simply use free tools to create sitemap for google. Most of them are already in compliance to google's standard.
Are you using Googles web master tools? It will show you what's wrong. Use a broken link checker to see if your site map is valid before submitting.
try xml-sitemaps.com then del;ete the others. re submit to webmaster tools dash board and if there are any errors they will be reported to you there.
i'm sorry it took so long to get back - but i never did get google to accept my sitemap... i've copied the formatting and pasted it in here <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.dilusiauto.com/</loc> <lastmod>2008-12-08</lastmod> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> <priority>0.9</priority> </url> </urlset> just nothing worked for me... another thing I'm a little confused about is that even if webmaster tools neglected it, does the spider still attempt to read it?
This is my format and I have a ton of dynamic links and have no error from them. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?> <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://www.homecomputergames.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3</loc> <lastmod>2009-01-08</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.5</priority> </url> </urlset> I know when I had the priority repeated above 0.5 very often I got an error. Not every page can be as important as the other I guess.
HCG: thanks its nice to see somebody else's format, i think you have something there about the priority too i was looking into a sitemap generator and I was suggested to try the RoR type of generator - all of those seem to be junk and not work... does anyone know a more modern one?
I wrote my own because most sitemap scripts didn't handle sites over 50,000 pages well. They tried to make it all one sitemap and I believe the limit by Google is 50,000 pages per sitemap. Sitemap stats Total URLs: 142321 Indexed URLs: 58094
I'll let you guess and see if you can get it I don't have the 3,000 downloadable games in my sitemap yet, or the new arcade. That's another 1500 pages. I heard Google likes big sites so thought I would give them one...