Suddenly my sitemaps are not accepted?
« on: January 29, 2008, 11:47:30 AM »
I have been using this site to generate sitemaps for months now and they have always been succesful. However, slowly and one by one in my Webmaster Tools they are coming up with errors..

Unsupported file format
Your Sitemap does not appear to be in a supported format. Please ensure that it meets our Sitemap guidelines and resubmit

I have done everything correct as far as I know, I am using the uncompressed versions.

Here is one sitemap that has errors apparently:

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Any help would be very appreciated as pulling my hair out now!
Re: Suddenly my sitemaps are not accepted?
« Reply #1 on: January 29, 2008, 10:01:51 PM »
Hello,

please check your .htaccess file in domain root, looks like you have a malicious code in it that redirects all googlebot requests to an external site. This is a major issue SEO-wise and I suggest you to address it ASAP (remove those lines from .htaccess).
Re: Suddenly my sitemaps are not accepted?
« Reply #2 on: February 07, 2008, 03:41:01 PM »
Hi Admin, thank you for your reply. Can you tell me, how can you tell this from my sitemap?
Re: Suddenly my sitemaps are not accepted?
« Reply #4 on: February 08, 2008, 01:00:52 AM »
Thanks.

I am still having problems getting Google to accept the sitemap, but also my visits to the site have gone from around 3,500 a week to about 480 so my hosting account company are looking into potential firewall blockages on the account (maybe this would be stopping Google reading it properly?). I am also moving the site to a different sewrver within the account so hopefully this may fix my issues.
Re: Suddenly my sitemaps are not accepted?
« Reply #5 on: February 08, 2008, 01:49:19 AM »
Do you have an .htaccess file in domain root? If yes, please PM me it's contents.
Re: Suddenly my sitemaps are not accepted?
« Reply #6 on: February 08, 2008, 03:46:47 PM »
Have PM'd you , thanks