olivesheep.com/ewe

12 August 2007

Giving Up On Sitemap.xml

Posted by Poppa under: Site News .

I realize that some of you who read this really don’t have an understanding of what some of my “Site News” posts really mean.  But I post them anyways as an outlet for my thoughts.  I’ve spent about 2 days now trying to get my sitemap to be read by Google and I’m about to give up.

First problem I encountered was that I could not verify my site with Googles webmaster tools.  You can do this one of two ways 1) create a file with a certain name in the root of your site 2) insert a specific META tag onto the main page of your site.  I tried the file upload method first, but no matter what I did Google just couldn’t see the file.  It was there, I could click the link to the file that Google displayed to me while going through the validation process, but when it would try to read the file for validation it would always say “Not Found”.  So I tried the META tag route and that worked just fine, I was able to verify that this site is really my site.

The second thing I ran into, and this where I had sitemap problems, was that after creating the sitemap on the root of my site, and telling Google about it, it would return an error back to me stating that…

Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
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

My robots.txt file is empty (or at least it was at the time) and I even used Googles tool to check out my robots.txt file and it says that it can read it fine and that it’s not blocking anything on my site.  I also used two different tools to create a sitemap.xml file.  I had thought that maybe my .htaccess file had something to do with it, so I did what was suggested on another site and I renamed it.  But that didn’t work either.  No matter what I’ve tried, Google just can’t seem to read the root of my site properly.  So I’m gunna give up on this for now.  Maybe I’ll come across a solution eventually but, it’s being moved to the back burner.  Having a sitemap that’s working well isn’t something I need to have, I just thought it might help Google index my site a little faster (which they haven’t done since April 7th for some reason).

Update:  Ok, so those of you who really know me, know that I can’t just give up on something that easily.  If there’s something computer related that’s broken, and I can’t fix it because I don’t know how, it will completely drive me crazy until it’s done.  From what I can tell, I was able to fix my problem by changing the persmissions on my .htaccess files.  They were set extremely low (too low) for some reason and once I changed them and tried to re-submit my sitemap.xml file to Google it returned “OK”.  Things were good, and all was well, from what I could tell.  And then today, things got better… as the bots are coming around now.  Both Google and Yahoo have been visiting us all day long.

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