Google Sitemaps FAQ

I thought this might help

http://quick-help.net/xml-sitemaps

 

All, since about a week, there are have been reports of problems with existing Google sitemaps: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=673622

K

 

Yes, I've seen those threads. It is\was an error on Google's side I believe, nothing related to the FAQ.

 

@ssandecki: Any idea when it will be fixed?

K

 

Not sure, I didn't know they were still have sitemap issues. You link me directly to your xml sitemap and I'll review it and make sure its standard. I've been lucky and had no issues.

 

I am interested in your comments.

K

 

Update: The problem only seems to have started occurring with sitemaps listing one URL only. I added an additional URL entry (for the RSS feed) in the sitemap of one site (resulting in the "HL7Experts" sitemap having 2 entries) and the problem went away:

http://www.HL7-Experts.info/sitemap.xml is now OK

http://www.Style4BG.com/sitemap.xml still is showing an error in WMT

Seems like a Google sitemap parsing bug for sure ...

K

@ssandecki: What are your thoughts on including RSS links in sitemaps?

 

I'm not sure what your using to create your site, you should read this threads FAQ

http://www.civicseo.com/sitemap.xml <-- That is a standard XML Sitemap.

 

... I use the official sitemap specifications at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php with an added reference to a stylesheet so they render well when viewed...

K

 

Ahhh, I forgot about that. Got me on that one!

 

The advantage of using the V0.9 sitemap protocol is that I believe it is accepted across other search engines (Yahoo, MS Live, etc.) ...

Adding a stylesheet also eliminates the "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it" error displayed in some browsers...

I had looked at your very useful FAQ but did not find any references to including the URLS of RSS feeds. Any thoughts on this?

Also, I noticed you don't use the <priority> tags ...

K

 

Priority, changefreq and modification date are all optional

 

Yes, this is true - but why not give the web-crawlers hints about the priority and update frequency of our pages?

K

 

I wonder ... if my sitemap is not accurate , will it hurt my crawled efficiency ???

 

rachel4u, Google says (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html#xmlTagDefinitions) says that the optional tags are "considered a hint and not a command" ... so if your sitemap is missing this, I think you will still be crawled OK, but not 100% optimal

 

I don't believe the Google really follows the optional tags unless used properly and accurately.

 

All,

I am happy to post that the problem with Google reading sitemaps containing only one URL that I reported 10 days ago

appears to have been fixed.

Thanks Google WMT Team!

K

 

Excellent, those threads kept growing and growing

 

Oops, was I too fast? I just re-checked my Google WMT Dashboard - and the errors are back

Could this be a data center issue? Eg. am I getting my WMT Dashboard reports from different data centers - and some still show the errors?

K

 

Your stilling getting errors?