[Plugin: Google XML Sitemaps] XML sitemap problem and a solution

  • vinayakgole

    (@vinayakgole)


    16 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,
    I have been using the Google XML sitemap for months now until recently. After the last upgrade (both WordPress and the plugin) Google webmaster tools refused to download my sitemap stating:
    “Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead” .
    After deliberating and searching over the internet for a couple of days, I was able to get help from a query I had posted on the forum here
    The content type was being shown as
    Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=iso-8859-1(CR)(LF)
    instead of text/xml.
    I then created a sitemap manually from http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/ and uploaded the generated xml file.
    Google successfully downloaded the file and I now get a green tick instead of the red cross.
    Also the content type is now shown as xml.
    I am not a master of web technologies and whatever I do requires a lot of research. But I now have to assume that there is something wrong here. Either Google has changed the validation process(which seems more probable) or the plugin is broken.
    However,I have posted this information so that it might be useful for anyone else facing the same problem.
    Regards,
    Vinayak

    http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter vinayakgole

    (@vinayakgole)

    16 years, 5 months ago

    By the way,
    Please feel free to check out how my sitemap looks like now:
    http://pda-phone-reviews.in/sitemap.xml

    You will notice it looks much different than the one generated by the plugin.

    Regards,
    Vinayak

    netnut

    (@netnut)

    16 years, 4 months ago

    Hi vinayakgole,

    Just wanted to say THANKS for posting your solution. Saved me a huge amount of time.

    I just discovered this problem yesterday. Not only was I getting a sitemap error in Webtools, Google completely stopped crawling my site around 12/25/09. My traffic has slowly dropped off to about half, and since it’s an e-commerce site that really hurts. 🙁

    But de-activating the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, and manually putting up a sitemap instead, fixed the problem. Google is crawling my site again, so hopefully it won’t take too long to repair the damage.

    I really hope a fix is found soon for the Sitemaps plugin, though. It sure is great when it works.

    arboundy

    (@arboundy)

    16 years, 1 month ago

    You can find my workaround here: http://www.arboundy.com/2010/04/wordpress-2.9-sitemap-generator-failing-workaround/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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