The blog has moved to http://jessehouse.com/ ... Many google searches point here so I am leaving it operational, but there will be no new posts.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap.xml issues

After uploading my sitemap.xml file to Google Webmaster Tools I received the following error message and no additional error details were included:

Error: The last attempt at downloading the Sitemap failed. The details below are representative of the last successful download.

I searched around a bit and found a forum post where someone said they get this error 'sometimes', but after switching to use a gzip formatted sitemap.xml file the error went away

on ubuntu

gzip ./sitemap.xml

compresses the file to ./sitemap.xml.gz and deletes the sitemap.xml file by default

after uploading Google was able to process without issue

2 comments:

Unknown said...

But is sitemap.xml that important?
I do not think so.. Moreover this blog mentioned below will lay more light to what I want to say..
http://www.redalkemi.com/blog/sitemapxml-the-most-overrated-search-engine-indexing-factor/

House 9 said...

Compared to having relevant content and good structure (i.e. h1, h2, proper use of title tag, etc...) it probably is not that important.

But it can't hurt to include one and submit it to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask; it definitely won't hurt your page ranking.