I have a new website for which I setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. These were setup last week Wednesday (5 days ago at time of writing).
I submitted the sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. Bing works perfectly and is happy with the sitemap.
Google search console sais Sitemap can be read, but has errors
and then goes on to say This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location.
Here's a screenshot:
My sitemap is at the root, ie: www.example.com/sitemap.xml
. Here it is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/pricing/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/contact/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/faq/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
When setting up Google Search Console you can select Domain Verification
or URL prefix
. I selected Domain Verification
. However since getting the above error I also tried URL prefix
which results in the same issue.
I only have 4 urls on the website and so I went to URL inspection
and requested indexing for each of them manually. The next day I came back to check and they are all now indexed correctly.
Please note that I do have a robots.txt
in place as follows:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
So it appears as though my site and all urls are indexed correctly, it is just the sitemap that search console is complaining about. As mentioned, Bing webmaster tools is happy with the sitemap and I am confident it does not contain errors because it is generated automatically by my backend.
Do I need to be worried about this or can it be safely ignored? I'm not sure what else I can do since my domain verified correctly and the urls I submitted manually are now indexed?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
? Is that missing, or did you just not copy and paste it in?changefreq
andpriority
fields from your sitemap. Google doesn't use them. They just make the file unnecessarily large.changefreq
andpriority
. I have the domain property because I also have sub domains however those are not in the sitemap and I have not added them to search console. I haveexample.com
andsupport.example.com
which is why I registered the domain property forexample.com
. But as mentioned my sitemap only contains the above listed urls forexample.com