A Problem with Sitemaps

  • Resolved deeveearr

    (@deeveearr)


    1 year, 11 months ago

    Ever since the Easter Weekend started, Google has been throwing hissy-fits.

    First, it wouldn’t index my schema (I’m using Schema Pro for this), but then I gave it a couple of hours and all went back to normal.

    Then it was insisting that there was a ‘site-wide problem’ and this was affecting everything in Search Console. I again left it a couple of hours and all went back to normal.

    Yesterday (Sunday) saw my Yoast sitemaps refusing to be fetched, with the error message ‘couldnt fetch’.

    I’ve got a video sitemap generator from FLV to index my pages and posts containing videos, and that seems to be working fine.

    It’s these Yoast ones though that Google doesn’t seen to like.

    I’ve cleared ALL caches in my website, then deleted and re-installed the sitemap_index.xml, but they’re still not working.

    So then I tried adding each sitemap one-by-one – Google likes SOME of them, but not others, so I removed all of those and went back to the index.xml.

    A screenshot of the FLV Video sitemap and the Yoast sitemap index is shown HERE.

    Is there a fix for this?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter deeveearr

    (@deeveearr)

    I think that I’ve found the answer to my own problem.

    Funnily enough, I found it in the Rank Math knowledge base!

    I just added the following code:

    /(.)sitemap(.).xml
    /(.*)sitemap.xsl
    /sitemap_index.xsl
    /sitemap_index.xml

    …into Litespeed Cache’s “do not cache these URL’s” field, and it all fired up STRAIGHT AWAY!

    Thread Starter deeveearr

    (@deeveearr)

    Ok, so maybe this issue is not fixed after all, as six hours after the sitemap index was uploaded, it’s again showing as ‘couldnt fetch’.

    It looks to me like Yoast needs to introduce its own non-caching for sitemaps, rather than rely on other plugins to do it.

    Loft 33

    (@loftexternal)

    We seem to have a similar issue for a few of our sites.
    Google Search does not seem to like our sitemaps; after submitting (either /sitemap_index.xml or page-sitemap.xml) the status get’s set to “couldn’t fetch“; the extended error just shows a “General HTTP error“, which doesn’t really help narrowing down the problem.
    The odd thing is that it only affects a few sites, and for a few the issue seems to resolve after a few days, while on others it seems to persist.

    Version info:
    WordPress: 6.2
    Yoast SEO: 20.4 / 20.5

    Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello @deeveearr

    I’m sorry about the delay in getting a response from us.

    Unfortunately, Google doesn’t provide more information about why they cannot read the sitemap. The sitemap loads correctly in the browser.

    1. Does the URL inspection tool‘s live test show any errors with the sitemap URL? If yes, please resolve the errors.
    2. Did you submit the sitemap to the Google Search Console profile that matches the preferred URL format, including HTTP(s) and WWW or non-WWW?
    Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    This thread was marked resolved due to a lack of activity, but you’re always welcome to re-open the topic. Please read this post before opening a new request.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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