These are other entries in our FAQ database:

• Using meta-tags to specify content date
  
• Google Sitemaps: general information
  
• Google Sitemaps: statistics and verification
  
• Google Sitemaps: technical information
  
• The priority attribute in Google Sitemaps
  

Questions, ideas, problems, wishes? Be informed whenever something new comes up (or any important problems are fixed.)

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Information about Google Sitemaps error messages

Some of the error messages Google uses within the Sitemaps system.

• "This url is not allowed for a sitemap at this location"
• "Invalid date"
• "We couldn't find your verification file."

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Error "This url is not allowed for a sitemap at this location"

This error means that your sitemap contains URLs which are not alllowed in your sitemap. A proper Google Sitemap generate will only include URLs allowed URLs, but it is possible that you upload the Sitemap file to an incorrect location. A sitemap file can only include URLs for files on same domain and the same or deeper directories. Here's an example:

Your sitemap file is saved at http://www.example.com/hero/sitemap.xml

These URLs are all allowed:

• http://www.example.com/hero/
• http://www.example.com/hero/contact.html
• http://www.example.com/hero/test/index.html
• http://www.example.com/hero/info/about/guestbook

The following URLs are not allowed:

• http://www.example.com/ (Higher directory level than your sitemap)
• http://www.example.com/hero (Higher directory level, missing trailing slash so the URL is treated like a file)
• http://www.example.com/marcel/ (Higher directory level than your sitemap)
• http://www.hero.com (Not the same domain)
• http://example.com/hero/ (Not the same domain)

By moving your sitemap file to http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml you could include the 3 first denied URLs in the above listing. In this case you could include the following URLs:

• http://www.example.com/hero
• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/marcel/
• http://www.example.com/marcel/my-wedding.html

Error "Invalid date"

This error means that your sitemap contains an entry somewhere which has a badly formatted date. Google Sitemaps requires the ISO-8601 encoding for dates. The GSiteCrawler will handle this for you automatically. If you see this error message, it is most likely that you manually changed part of the sitemap file before uploading it.

Error "We couldn't find your verification file."

Please double check that you named your verification file correctly (like Google told you) and that there are no spaces in front or after the file name. The GSiteCrawler can generate the verification file for you, you can just copy+paste the filename from the web page to the GSiteCrawler and let it upload the appropriate file. Otherwise you may also use the meta-tag verification system.

If it still does not work, make sure your server returns correct headers for existing URLs (200) and for missing URLs (404). You can check this by using a server header status code tool. Enter the URL to your verification file and check that your server returns "200 OK" as the status code. Then try a not existing page and verify that your server returns "404 Not found". If you recieved a "200 OK" again then you need to adjust your servers settings (or contact your hoster to do it for you). Please note that there are some hosters that block Google from accessing the site fully - in these cases you might also see this error message. If your hoster is blocking Google's access, then submitting a Google Sitemap file is futile, Google won't be able to crawl the URLs anyway. In this case I can only recommend moving to a hoster with a real understanding of the internet.