• Resolved marioluigi

    (@marioluigi)


    I have this plugin on a Google News site.

    Currently using both the “regular” sitemap.xml AND sitemap-news.xml.
    On the Console, sitemap.xml shows pages, tags, categories OK.

    But for posts, it shows:
    Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.
    Examples
    Line 1
    Tag:
    html

    With 0 discovered URLs.

    Any ideas how to resolve this? I saw a post from a few days ago but I don’t use any robots.txt directives.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Hi, it might be an HTML error page.

    To check this, open your sitemap.xml index in your browser, then follow the link to the sitemap that is reported as HTML. Does it look like the other sitemaps or is the output different? If it is indeed some HTML error response message, then you might need to set the option “Split by” on Settings > XML Sitemap (under the related post type) to Year or Month to solve possible PHP memory issues.

    If you want me to look at your sitemaps, please share a link πŸ™‚

    Thread Starter marioluigi

    (@marioluigi)

    Hi RavanH,

    When I click on the “post-types,” on the standard sitemap, it brings me directly back to the homepage.

    I just changed the “Split by” settings to Month and also cleared the cache. The same issue seems to persist.

    The URL is here

    Thanks πŸ™‚

    OK, so it’s a redirection of all date archives back to your homepage. In that case, your only option is actually to set the Split by to None. Or disable the date archive redirection. Is it Yoast SEO that you are using maybe? Then there should actually be an admin message warning about this setting with an explanation about how to prevent the conflict…

    Thread Starter marioluigi

    (@marioluigi)

    That did it! Is there any drawback to having it Split to None?

    I’m using Rank Math. No warning showed up. RM is still pretty new so maybe it hasn’t been coded yet? Or something broke? Not too sure.

    Thanks for your solution!

    Drawback of “split by none” is that the sitemap can become slow (or even fail due to insufficient PHP memory) when you have many posts. It all depends on your number of posts and your server resources.

    Rank Math? I’m not familiar with that plugin. Does that cause the redirect of date archives?

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    @marioluigi Why did you report this topic?

    Thread Starter marioluigi

    (@marioluigi)

    @jdembowski I apologize for that. I don’t recall reporting anything- may have been haphazard with the keyboard.

    @ravanh In that case, I’ll probably disable the auto redirect so it can split properly since there are a ton of posts. We can switch freely without any repercussions, correct?

    Rank Math is a new SEO plugin that does allow redirect of date/author archives exactly like Yoast. So that’s probably the error basis.

    I’ve checked your sitemap (the unsplit version) and it does load so at this point you should be fine. But if you foresee many new publications then at some point you could start seeing issues.

    Switching to another split-by option should not in theory pose a problem as long as you submitted the main sitemap.xml index, but I did get reports from users where google bot keeps on trying old sitemap adresses for a while, so you’ll have to be patient and not switch too often πŸ˜‰

    I’ll check out Rank Math if I find some time…

    Thread Starter marioluigi

    (@marioluigi)

    Thanks a ton. I’ll be switching to the Split by after I disable the redirection, just so I can avoid any performance issues down the line. Thanks for your assistance during this matter! Awesome support! This can be resolved!

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

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