: Google Webmaster Tools says my XML sitemap "appears to be an HTML page" We're running a lot of sites and we've started to get a lot of these errors in Webmaster Tools: Sitemap is HTML

Posted in: #GoogleSearchConsole #Html #Iis #Sitemap #Xml

We're running a lot of sites and we've started to get a lot of these errors in Webmaster Tools:

Sitemap is HTML
Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

One of the problematic sitemaps:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.same_domain.co.uk/folder/file1.shtml</loc>
<lastmod>2011-05-11</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.same_domain.co.uk/folder/file2.shtml</loc>
<lastmod>2011-05-11</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.same_domain.co.uk/folder/file3.shtml</loc>
<lastmod>2011-05-11</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.same_domain.co.uk/folder/file4.shtml</loc>
<lastmod>2011-05-11</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Why would GWTs think this is anything but XML?

(Server: IIS)

Edit:

"This document was successfully checked as well-formed XML!" -W3C Validator.

Edit:

I resubmitted two problematic sitemaps, one with no changes, and one with a couple of extra lines to ensure it's treated as XML. Ran the "Fetch as Googlebot" diagnostic tool. Both are fine now. I'm just going to re-submit all sitemaps with the "Sitemap is HTML" error

The question remains:

Why did this happen? Why did GWTs think these XML sitemaps were HTML?

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@Alves908

Check if there are any issues from the web server side. Or if the Google IP is blocked. If you are using any log based tracking system, try to analyse the Google Bot activity. We recently had the same issue and found out that as Google changed its IP address, we were not allowing google bots to crawl through due to data mining. Issue was finally resolved.

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@Angie530

Farseeker's suggestion is a good first step in troubleshooting (a text/html content-type would certainly produce this result) - Google Webmaster Tools should display a different error message if the sitemap file contains invalid XML.

Given the temporary nature of the issue, have you checked your server logs to determine whether an error page was produced on Google's prior requests?

If you are dynamically generating sitemap files, a scripting error, database timeout, or other issue could produce an HTML error page intermittently.

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@Sue5673885

You could extend the header to include the schema stuff:

<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 www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd >

and then validate online

If it passes that it must be Google's problem.

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@Murphy175

Because of the content-type header that it's spitting out. Inspect it with your favourite tool (Firebug, etc) and see what it's sending.

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: Google Webmaster Tools says my XML sitemap "appears to be an HTML page" We're running a lot of sites and we've started to get a lot of these errors in Webmaster Tools: Sitemap is HTML

More posts by @Berryessa370

: What is a deploy script? Conversation: Me: How do we do the swap over though? Won't there be downtime no matter how we do it? X: Well, we will need to do a complete deploy

: Advice on trying to determine the rankings of my keywords via PHP I've written a piece of code, which crawls the search engines, first 40 50 results and check's for the specified keywords and

: Font displays differently in Firefox vs. Chrome It seems that my menu bar is displayed with a different font stretch in Firefox than it is in Chrome. See the following: Here is the CSS

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