Guys , I am facing problem with sitemap in google web master. It shows X mark and says error =-1 in downloaded file. I tried uploading new sitemap but nothing is changed in status . Its as per Google guidelines . Link is http://www.smallbizexpress.com/sitemap.xml . Let me know how can i fix this . This happened today
I have renamed the file from sitemap.xml to Sitemap.xml .. Now one thing worked out is text sitemap. I have used urllist.txt which has be crawled and not showing error --
Are you submitting your sitemap.xml file manually through Google's Webmaster Tools (WMT) or are you just counting on Google to find it via your robots.txt? If you submit it manually through Google's WMT then it should tell you what the error is... I think the most common error that people run into with sitemap.xml files is that they include URLs in the sitemap which redirect to another URL. So people will submit a sitemap.xml with URLA in it. When Google requests URLA they get redirected to URLB. Google doesn't like this and will consider this an invalid sitemap.xml. They want you to put URLB, in this example, in the sitemap.xml. FYI: Your robots.txt is actually invalid (although Google probably still parses it). It appears as: and the standard for robots.txt states that you should have a blank link after the Disallow: directive and before the sitemap: directive like: