Google Webmaster is not Accepting my Sitemap

Question

After setting my Google Webmaster account and verified my website, i failed to add my sitemap to it. It was issuing the following error.

enter image description here

I tried to do the following:

I removed the robots.txt and still didn't work.
I tried to verify my sitemap on http://www.validome.org/google/validate and it got reported as valid.
I checked the sitemap and my URL several times for errors and everything seemed to be alright.

For Reference:

My sitemap.xml is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
            http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
  <loc>http://www.myDomain.com/</loc>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>http://www.myDomain.com/about/</loc>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>0.90</priority>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>http://www.myDomain.com/help.php</loc>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>0.90</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

My Robots.txt is as follows:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Sitemap: http://www.myDomain.com/sitemap.xml

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 11 '12 at 10:04

1

Here is some nice reference for you problem with htaccess rules against bot :

http://www.widexl.com/tutorials/htaccess.html

http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27809

answered Aug 11 '12 at 10:04

user56

15
4

Thanks for your answer. I am not quite sure i understood what you mean. Do you mean that i have problem with my htaccess? Have you faced this problem before? I would be glad if you can elaborate a bit. – CompilingCyborg Aug 11 '12 at 19:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 11 '12 at 09:51

0

If you want something really effective for your need :

Replace your robots.txt rules by this one :

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.myDomain.com/sitemap.xml

And add this to your .htaccess

#Block ia_archiver & duggmirror
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*.ia_archiver|duggmirror* [NC]
    RewriteRule .* - [F]


#Block cgi access
    <filesMatch "^php5?\.(ini|cgi)$">
        Order Deny,Allow
        Deny from All
        Allow from env=REDIRECT_STATUS
    </filesMatch>

edited Aug 11 '12 at 09:51

user56

15
4

answered Aug 10 '12 at 16:09

Dark

505
4
12

You mentioned a good note there! Thanks – CompilingCyborg Aug 10 '12 at 16:19

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 15 '12 at 10:32

It turned out the problem was from Google servers. I didn't change anything, just left the whole topic for a week and tried again. Everything seems to be working fine now.

Sometimes due to some major updates or Google busy servers, the acceptance of sitemaps takes more time that the usual rates. For those people who are facing similar problems, just wait for some days and give it another shot before complaining in Google forums and such.

Google Webmaster is not Accepting my Sitemap

3 Answers3