Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap Tip
Earlier today I had a question submitted to BoneheadSEO about a Google sitemap issue and felt that it was important that I answered it for everyone since it’s likely that at some point in your SEO career or even when you begin the Bonehead SEO courses, you may run across this same issue as well.
The question was:
We’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that doesn’t include the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap do use the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/myfile.htm).
What this person ran into was nothing more than a simple error that can be easily fixed but to someone who is unfamiliar with submitting sitemaps it can be a very intimidating and scary message.
When you first visit Google’s Webmaster Tools the very first thing that you’ll need to do is add your website so that Google can give you various reports. One item within the Google Webmaster Tools area that’s very important to make use of is their “Sitemap submission”.
The sitemap area within Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to enter the URL where your sitemap resides on your site so that Google can then update their records with all of the pages that you’ve included within your sitemap.
However, if the path for your website that you initially submitted and the path for your sitemap are different you’ll receive the error that the person received above.
Notice that the difference between the two URLs in the message above is nothing more than a missing “www” in the sitemap link that was submitted.
All that this means is that when you initially added your website to Google’s Webmaster Tools area you added a different URL (either containing the “www” or not) than the URL your sitemap resided on.
An easy fix to this is to first check and see what the URL is to your sitemap file (either http://www.SomeSite.com/GoogleSitemap.xml or http://SomeSite.com/GoogleSitemap.xml and then when you are ready to add your site, be sure that the URL to your site is the same as what your sitemap URL is, either with a “www” or without.
That’s all for today – we’ll talk soon,
Kristine