I have submitted Sitemaps using Googles Webmaster Tools many times for several sites. Never had a problem. I use XML-Sitemaps.com to generate the Sitemap.
I have just redesigned my own site: http://stationv.com and uploaded it about 10 hours ago. Before uploading, I deleted the old site from my server. The new site is up and running as expected.
When I resubmitted my Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, I got the following results:
Line Status: Duplicate URL / This URL is a duplicate of another URL in the sitemap. Please remove it and resubmit.
I have checked the code in the sitemap.xml file and there is no duplication of the /index.html file. Can anyone tell me what is going on here and how to fix it?
As far as your sitemap situation, I just ran iGooMap (which is a separate standalone sitemap.xml maker) on your site URL and it didn’t double up any of the URL’s. Strange indeed.
Thanks for looking into this for me. Google has great help documents and I think I’ve read all the relative ones - I wish I could just give them a call or send an email to their support. That kind of support does not seem to exist.
Did a little more research in the Google Sitemap Forum and found the answer. The sitemap.xml generated by XML-Sitemaps.com had both: http://stationv.com/
and http://stationv.com/index.html
The form suggested that these were the cause of the duplicate error and that removing the one ending with “…/index.html” would solve the problem and it did.
I just checked a site that I have had up and running for over a year with a sitemap.xml generated by XML-Sitemaps.com and it too had both occurrences. Guess I need to contact XML-Sitemaps and see what is going on here.
Thanks,
Vic
I did try and retry outputting it. I think it is a problem with the generator I’m using. Although it worked well in the past, the Google Analytics Report always showed separate page reports for both the …stationv.com/ and the …stationv.com/index.html. Obviously this is not necessary as the two reports contain the same info. Perhaps Google has recently added the error message to avoid this.
Do you have another generator to suggest?
I am not familiar with iGooMap so would appreciate seeing the file. Thanks, Vic
I sent out an email to you with the XML site-map attached in a ZIP.
Also real quick, I saw two things on your site:
On the ‘Website Design’, ‘Fun’, and ‘About’ pages, the footer on the bottom has a white background while the other pages have a transparent background so the gradient shows through.
The second thing is that on your ‘Contact’ page, it has a huge scroll bar on the side (viewed in Safari 3) and the banner gradient doesn’t stretch across the screen like the other pages, plus you get like a 10px space from the top of the page. After looking into it further it has to do with the table you’re using on that page.
There was a fix for that a while back in another thread that I saw but I can’t remember what it was.
I received your email, thanks very much. The code looks exactly the same as the code from my generator albeit just a tiny bit more readable.
Thanks too for the report on my site. The footer problems were just an oversight and have been fixed. However the Contact page poses a bit of a problem. The site is built on the Box Model. I’m using Forms To Go with the fields contained in a table. F2G does not seem to read the fields as a form when the table is inserted inline. So, I had to ditch the Box Model in the middle section of the page which means that the page alignment had to be set to “Center”. What do I do to maintain the look of the header and footer of all the other pages? I tried setting the container boxes to 100% but that did not do the trick. Any suggestions.
I believe it has something to do with the form elements. I’m trying to search here on another tab on how to fix that, but it had something to do with forms adding a margin and that caused a riff.
I know I have had to use it recently for a CMS-based site and it worked (even though I didn’t know about the thread), so perhaps it’ll help with yours.
As far as iGooMap, in a nutshell, it just provides me with more readable Sitemap files which don’t help or hurt my searchability, but clients like to see a pretty formatted xml file, regardless if they know what it means or does. The software works quickly and I can change the options and all this stuff which you can kinda do on the website. It also allows you to save out your XML documents in various formats and allows you to remove certain pages or certain page extensions so it doesn’t sitemap the whole site which can be a big time saver. I’ve used xml-sitemaps.com once or twice when I first started web design and was happy with it, but I got a license for this off some deal and have been using that since. Personal preference I suppose.
As suggested, I created the robot.txt file on the Google Webmaster Tools page (nav to “Crawlers”), uploaded it. Created a new Sitemap.xml at xml-sitemaps.com, and uploaded it. Went back to Google and hit the resubmit button and within a few minutes the green check mark appeared.
Seems like a convoluted way to get to this end… especially when it was so easy before.