Hi my submission keeps giving error status. I have generated sitemap using www.xml-sitemaps.com and www.freesitemapgenerator.com. Every time I resubmit, Google gives this error: "We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit." This happen for two websites already. http://www.604cleaner.com/sitemap.xml http://www.vancouverappliancerepair.com/sitemap.xml I am not sure what went wrong. The Sitemap syntax looks ok and can be accessed via Firefox & IE. Please help. this has caused dramatic dropped in search engine.
Tried resubmitting under different names, Removing 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" from the file, Deleting entry without-www on Google Webmasters tool All to no avail. Does posting sitemap from China has something to do with the error? Can someone shed some light? thanks.
Hmmm... You haven't some kind of robots or .htaccess rule that blocks access based on e.g. ip addresses or user agents? It's really a far out guess, but the best I have. Some people accidently configure their server to block e.g. unknown crawlers/browsers. The really unlucky ones may accidently block Google
Add your site's url without the prefix, like domain.com, don't delete the existing one. The select that url and re-upload your sitemap. It worked for me.
robots.txt (downloaded 3 hours ago with 200 success) only has: User-agent: * Disallow: Now the sitemap kicks in with accepted status and half of pages indexed. Problem still remains though - ranking drop from page 1 to 2 after Sitemap re-submission. There could be an algo change that changed the rules? Should I focus on SEO or keep thinking it is a Sitemap issue?
Unless you have lots and lots of duplicate content, I don't think sitemaps can ever hurt your rating. It's just one more way for Google to discover URLs. Perhaps your server had some failures/fallouts at unlucky times doing Google could not get to sitemap before now?