4

I've submitted a couple of sitemaps in search console but they are stuck on the 'cant fetch' status and have been for weeks now.

If I go to the URL I can see the sitemap OK and if I go to the old style search console and do test sitemap they all pass with no errors so I'm assuming Google can see them OK.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get these to validate?

Here's an example link to one of my sitemaps:

https://example.com/sitemaps/sitemap-pages.xml

Improve this question
4
  • 1
    try adding your sitemap in your web root
    – Vishwa
    Commented Apr 2, 2019 at 11:15
  • The new sitemap report does show that error when in reality it is still processing the file. If the old one says fine, don't worry.
    – Tony McCreath
    Commented Apr 2, 2019 at 21:40
  • When I tried seeing a list of all your sitemaps, at quickplaysport.us/sitemaps I got a 403 Forbidden response. There's a chance that this block on the path from your root to your page is creating the crawler bottleneck. Try unblocking the sitemaps category page?
    – Henry Visotski
    Commented Apr 2, 2019 at 22:16
  • Thanks, when i go to the directory I get a 403 but if I go to the file URL then I see the xml file OK. I also added a copy of the sitemap into the root as suggested but this one does the same, its just stuck on couldn't fetch: quickplaysport.us/sitemap-pages.xml
    – user3914769
    Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 9:28

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

Context:

  • I used https://example.com/sitemaps.xml and it got couldn't fetch.

Solution:

  • Adding a suffix, e.g. https://example.com/sitemaps.xml?sitemap=1, works immediately.
Improve this answer
1

Had the same issue with sitemaps generated by CMS at /index.php?route=sitemap.

Been getting the Couldn't fetch for the longest time. Waited for a while according to the most common advice. Didn't help.

What did help was making the sitemap available at /sitemap.xml and submitting that instead.

You can either rename the file if it's a static file, or create a rewrite rule for Apache/Nginx, e.g.:

rewrite ^/sitemap.xml$ /index.php?route=sitemap break;
Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.