Google Webmaster

[daveww]

I have run Google Webmaster for each of my 3 websites and it tells me:

Sitemap is HTML
Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

I have done nothing (knowingly anyway) to the sitemap other than let Actinic generated it automatically.

Being somewhat naive in these matters, I wondered if anyone might be able to point me in the direction of how I could "please Google".

All help welcome.

Dave

[Duncan Rounding]

Google 'likes' an xml sitemap.
Take a look at this:
http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/

There are also many other generators around on the net.

[daveww]

Hi,

Thanks very much for the quick reply.

Our sites are hosted by 1&1 who have Google Sitemaps Beta which I do use from time to time to generate sitemaps - perhaps not often enough.

However when I run Webmaster it seems to be the acatalog/sitemap.html page that it is picking up (and commenting on).

Dave

[Duncan Rounding]

Actinic does generate its own sitemap and it is located in acatalog - so that is correct.
In addition to this you can have a sitemap.xml as well and place it in the root of your site. If you do this then you must generate it as frequently as you change your pages in Actinic.

[daveww]

Thanks Duncan.

I do have a file - google_sitemap.xml.gz in the root so I guess that is it. I will just need to get into a habit of updating it on a regular basis.

I appreciate your help.

Dave

[Ho Ho Bird]

In google webmaster tools you can confirm the name and location of your xml sitemap and ask google to come by and take a look. You'll be able to see the next day if it likes what it sees, and it tells you how many of the URLs you told it about it has chosen to index.

For info, it has indexed 141 of the 172 urls in my sitemap. I've yet to study why it it is not doing them all.

It has also started to report results from Actinic's own sitemap in some searches I make. I hadn't noticed it doing that before.

[simulaids]

error installing this

Google 'likes' an xml sitemap.
Take a look at this:
http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/

There are also many other generators around on the net.

Hi sorry i am new to all this, but ive just tried installing this program and the error came up " Please install internet information service 5.0 or higher"

it was the windows version i tried to install.

can anyone shine some light on this.

thanks in advance.

[Mike Hughes]

You'll be able to see the next day if it likes what it sees, and it tells you how many of the URLs you told it about it has chosen to index.

That's handy. At least you'll know which ones need a bit of work to get in the index.

Mike

[daveww]

In google webmaster tools you can confirm the name and location of your xml sitemap and ask google to come by and take a look. You'll be able to see the next day if it likes what it sees, and it tells you how many of the URLs you told it about it has chosen to index.

For info, it has indexed 141 of the 172 urls in my sitemap. I've yet to study why it it is not doing them all.

It has also started to report results from Actinic's own sitemap in some searches I make. I hadn't noticed it doing that before.

Thanks Peter. Have submitted the urls and Google is "thinking about indexing them" at the moment. If you do discover why it has excluded some of the urls I would be interested to know why.