I get 404’s on a few of mine.
This worked for me :
This can occur when you’re running W3 Total Cache and you’ve ticked the setting to hide the sitemap from normal visitors. What W3TC does is cache the error which normal visitors get, if they want to view the video XML sitemap. This error is then also served to googlebot, because the logic to show the sitemap to googlebot won’t execute. The best way to fix this is to create an extra user agent group.
You can create this user agent group by going to the W3TC’s settings. Under Performance and then User Agent Groups there’s a button “Create a group”. Click this button and call your group “Google” or “Googlebot” and then in the user agents field you just enter “googlebot”. This will force W3 Total Cache to make a separate cache for Googlebot user-agents. Another option is to prevent W3TC from caching video-sitemap.xml entirely, but since that’s slower, we actually prefer the user-agent group.
What if you don’t use W3TC? Because I don’t. This used to work GREAT for the longest time. It just seems to be the last few versions were dropping the ball. Will Yoast ever respond to one of these threads???
If you go to settings -> permalinks and hit save, do they return to normal?
For my author’s sitemap, yes. Aweesome. But for the filter_group-sitemap.xml I’m still getting 404’s
Hi Patrick,
Have you checked these possible solutions:
http://kb.yoast.com/article/123-xml-sitemap-errors
I hope that’ll fix it. Seems like a custom post type that doesn’t need a sitemap, that filter_group – are you sure there is valuable information in there that you want indexed? Isn’t it something you’d like to exclude at WordPress SEO > XML sitemap (bottom of the page)?
Hope that helps!
It very well may be a custom post type. I’m going to deactivate it. I guess the plugin was just being proactive and creating the sitemap on it’s own in anticipation that it had valuable info. I don’t even know where the instructions came from to create it. Thanks for the help on this – both of you! I’ve dropped this solution on every other thread I could find in an effort to direct people to this one and save you the emails/contacts. Just trying to do my part.
-PH
No problem, Patrick! We really appreciate it, as it highlights where we might have to improve the plugin or the documentation on the plugin. Thanks for that!
I totally would – if it were my ticket . 🙂
Ah 🙂 Indeed. Changed the comment right after I posted that 🙂
