Sitemaps

[csiemers]

I had Zoom build a sitemap for my site. When uploaded to Google, they indicated there were errors in the file.

The errors turned out to be the Recommended Links. Is there a way to turn that part of it off, so that it only creates a sitemap file from only the actual files and not the Recommended Links?

Thanks,
Cary

[Ray]

It is possible to have recommended links which will generate a sitemap that Google will not like. We can think of several scenarios such as:

1) You have a recommended link to an external site (eg. a sponsor or advertisement). Google will only accept sitemaps containing URLs that are within the site where the sitemap file itself is hosted.

2) You have relative paths for your recommended links (eg. "../home/mypage.html" or "/index.html") as opposed to absolute URLs, (eg. "http://www.mysite.com/home/mypage.html"). This would be rejected by Google on similar grounds to the above, since a relative link makes little sense in the sitemap.

We will need to address the above problems in one way or another. Most likely either providing the option to suppress all recommended links from the sitemap, or only suppressing the URLs in the above two scenarios. In some cases, people may want their recommended link in their sitemap, so we will need to cater for this as well.

If your problem is a different scenario, please let us know and if possible, provide the URLs of the recommended links in question.