Alexa's Blog

I decided to write this post with the hope that will help somebody to avoid the pain I had in the last two weeks with my blog sitemap.

Everything has started when in one day I noticed that my sitemap is reported with errors in my Google Webmasters Tools account. Because I didn´t changed everything in that part I have just re-submitted the sitemap again but finally I ended with the same errors.And here the pains begin.

I have clicked on the Errors link and looked at the reason which says:

“Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please
ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the
location you provided and then resubmit.”

Both the above files have been at the right location and I was able to see them in the browser.More than that, Yahoo and Msn get the files almost daily without any errors so this was really strange.

I was searching on the Internet and I found that many other people has the same problem without any apparent reason so I started to look the the possible reasons in order to eliminate all possible mistakes on my side.I have changed the file encoding to UTF-8, change & validate the structure and resubmitted again.I get the same error.

I get very pissed off and I opened a ticket to my hosting company (Sorry guys !) but that did not solved anything because they did not changed anything on the server also.

I was posted also a message n the Google Webmaster groups with the hope that somebody might help me but all I was get was a point to a possible DNS error which at the end has nothing to do with this.In all this period the Google bot has ignored my website totally. I did not found any attempt access to download the sitemap.xml file and that has make me think that definitively something is wrong on the Google side.
So I decided to make the only change I din not tried until now. To delete the old file from Google Webmaster Tools account and replace it with a new one with a different name.And guess what ?

THIS WORKED.

The new sitemap was downloaded by Google in 15 minutes and the crawler was again on my website after 20.

I must say that I found again a stupid situation where a stupid error message is not able to say what the real error is.They could at least to show the url to the sitemap they are trying to get, not mention that somebody from their staff should have a look from time to time to the Google Groups and try to check what´s wrong when people complains there.

So if you have similar problems, just rename the old sitemap file with a new name (adding a letter or something like that), delete the old one from your Google account and submit the new one.You have a big change to get your problems solved.

All the bests.