Google sitemap access error, something to do with .htaccess redirect from http://www. to http://

Question

I recently updated the htaccess of my site to redirect from http://www. to http://. It all works fine but now I've made some changes to my site and uploaded a new sitemap.xml to google webmaster. I'm getting the following message:

"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.
General HTTP error: Domain name not found"

I made the sitemap using www.xml-sitemaps.com, any idea how I might resolve this?

---

The domain is: http://lightandspace.co.uk

The sitemap is: http://lightandspace.co.uk/sitemap.xml

The .htaccess is:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.lightandspace.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://lightandspace.co.uk$1 [r=301,nc] 

Answer 1

One thing you should check is your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. If you've told Google to prefer www.lightandspace.co.uk over just lightandspace.co.uk, but you now have the former redirecting to the latter, that might well cause some crawling issues.

More generally, it seems that the "General HTTP error: Domain name not found" error is typically caused by DNS issues. However, both of your hostnames resolve just fine for me, even via Google's public DNS servers, so if that's the problem then I'm unable to reproduce it.