Which Sitemaps For Google Is The Right One?

[Ponics]

Ho!

For Google Webmasters Tools, which sitemaps should you submiited:

1) sitemap_index.xml or
2) sitemap.xml

I submitted both and got an error about the code not being valid.

I follow the instruction here:

You may need to specify a different folder or path on the server for your sitemap files, as the Google Sitemap protocol requires the files to be located at the base URL of the files which have been scanned. This means that if your sitemap files contain URLs such as:

http://www.mysite.com/index.html
http://www.mysite.com/story/page1.html
http://www.mysite.com/news/archive/test.html

Then your sitemap files must be hosted at the common base URL of the above files, and that is the root directory at http://www.mysite.com/

In the sitemap_index.xml file, I can read:

<sitemap>
<loc>http://sos-planet.org/sitemap.xml</loc>
</sitemap>

Last version - spider mode - using only folder starting point with no html page pointing to any files -

Thanks for any help!

Roger Pilon
sos-planet.org

[David]

The sitemap_index.xml file is only required if you have such a large site that you need multiple sitemap.xml files.

From sitemaps.org,
"You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs ... If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you should then list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file"

There is also some information here from Google about verification errors.

[Ponics]

Google Error on My Site map

Hi!

Can you have a look at my sitemap? It is located at: http://sos-planet.org/documents/sitemap.xml. Looks like a test file to me rather than a XML. Uploaded with FTP at the same time than all the Zoom files.

This is the code error I received after having submitted the sitemap:

Error Line : 2554
Valor de código no válido
El valor de esta etiqueta XML no es válido. Soluciónelo y vuelva a enviar la información.

Etiqueta principal: url
Etiqueta: priority
Valor: 14.2
Problema detectado el: 09/03/2010


English:

Invalid code - The value of this Xml is not valid. Fix it ans send it back. Than something about "priority" + a line error.

I submitted by the way the urllist.txt. No error message from Google except that it do not use it to index anything ( as expected - not a XMl) but again, no errors displayed - file is just sleeping on a shelve.

I am using the ZOOMPAGEBOOST values for Priority field in sitemap (XML only) - standard value - no customs ones.

Latest version - php output - indexation on line

Any suggestions?

Thanks for the fantastic support.

Roger Pilon, Librarian
sos-planet.org

[Ray]

We've confirmed that this is a bug in the "URL length" weighting option (which affects both the actual ranking in search results, and also the priority value for XML sitemaps), when it receives a URL that is over 100 characters long. This causes an invalid priority value in the XML sitemap.

This will be fixed in the next patch release (V6.0 build 1021)

In the meantime, you can workaround this by disabling the URL length weighting. Click on "Configure"->"Weightings" and change the "URL length" dropdown to "No adjustment". The new sitemap created when you re-index should no longer have an invalid value.