Old alert remains

Resolved Marco Panichi
(@marcopanichi)

8 years, 10 months ago

Salava Ravan

I have a problem with this sitemap:
http://www.lanostratv.it/sitemap.xml

I do not know if you remember, before I had the sitemap divided for years, but the 2012 sitemap did not load:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/one-sitemap-returns-white-screen-of-death/

Next, following your advice, I opted for a sitemap divided into months.

But the Google Search Console is telling me there is a problem:

If I click on the sitemap in the “Index Errors” tab, I still have a warning regarding the 2012 sitemap:

Indeed, if I follow the link (www.lanostratv.it/sitemap-posttype-post.2012.xml) the sitemap still seems to be accessible (but as it happened before, it returns a white screen).

How can I solve this problem?

Another question: Can this affect your site visibility negatively on Google? I’m recording some traffic leaks.

Thanks for any suggestion,

Marco

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

Plugin Author Rolf Allard van Hagen
(@ravanh)

8 years, 10 months ago

Hi Marco, yes I remember 🙂

It is strange that Google seems to insist on revisiting that old 2012 sitemap URL even though it is no longer referenced in the sitemap index.

Could you try this: In Webmaster Tools go to the “Index” section where you can remove site URLs (no idea how that is called in Italian but I suppose you know where to find it). Then submit that particular sitemap URL /sitemap-posttype-post.2012.xml for complete (not just temporary) removal.

You’ll have to wait a while for it to be processed (give it a day) but if that does not change the error, then try this: In Webmaster Tools go back to the “Sitemap” section and remove the main sitemap.xml. Then again wait a while and resubmit it.

Thread Starter Marco Panichi
(@marcopanichi)

8 years, 10 months ago

Hi Ravan,

thank you for the kind and useful answer.

I did it (remove the sitemap and submit it again) and now everything is ok!

Anyway, I’m little confused about the real functioning of sitemaps in Google/GSC; I was sure that Google would get the new sitemap; instead, it gots the new sitemap, but it continued to consider the old sitemap (year). Nothing in the documentation can explain this. It is like Google has two sitemaps: the one that webmaster send to it via GSC and another one that is built by itself. I feel like I’m missing something.

Thank you again!

Marco

Plugin Author Rolf Allard van Hagen
(@ravanh)

8 years, 10 months ago

Nothing in the documentation can explain this.

Indeed.

I might have to make the plugin do a redirect on ‘unused’ sitemap URLs instead of continue trying to respond to those requests. Or just a 404 response… I’m not sure yet.

In the mean time, you could do this by installing the excellent (but very powerful!) plugin Redirection. Then set one rule that redirects /sitemap-posttype-post.2012.xml to /sitemap-posttype-post.201212.xml for example.
Plugin Author Rolf Allard van Hagen
(@ravanh)

8 years, 10 months ago
OK, I found on https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en that removing the old sitemap in Search Console might not be enough as the spider may continue trying to access the sitemap. But you can use a rule in robots.txt to block access to that particular URL.

I notice you are using a static robots.txt file? Then you need to edit that and add this rule:
```
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /sitemap-posttype-post.2012.xml
```
If you wish to use the dynamic robots.txt function, you can simply delete the static robots.txt file and add your rules to the Robots.txt field on Settings > Reading:
```
User-agent: MSNBot
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: BINGBot
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /sitemap-posttype-post.2012.xml
```
Thread Starter Marco Panichi
(@marcopanichi)

8 years, 10 months ago

hi Ravan,

thank you very much for your support!

I’ve added the Disallow instruction in my robots.txt.

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

The topic ‘Old alert remains’ is closed to new replies.