having trouble getting a hosted sitemap recognized? try this trick

[soaringeagle]

i have a new site with a www and a subdomain  i couldnt get the www (ning site) sitemap recognized (hosted on a seperate sitemaps subdomain)

i put links to it on the site, i put a robots.txt sitemap refference

nothing got it to recognize the sitemap for weeks

untill i found a tip for hosting all your sites sitemaps on 1 server and creating a sitemap sitemap

so heres what you do

upload the sitemap to wherever your hosting it

then go into your dashboard, into the sitemaps thinty

here you change the 1st record  replace the url with your sitemaos url

and change the change frequency to daily (or however often yiou update your sitemaop) and priority to 1

now next delete all other records and uncheck the auto update

submit the new xml version it will show 1 url but should instantly or nearly instantly get the real sitemap recognized

heres my example

my ning sites sitemap as seen inthe dashboard

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://sitemaps.phillyhangout.com/sitemap.gz</loc&gt;
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

only 1 url listed the sitemap of the actual site

i could also add every 1 of the subsdomains and every other site i have as well

but every site would need to be verified in webmaster tools as mine including the 1 used only for sitemaps

edit

it still doesnt solve the problem with the sitemap indexes  pointing to www as the location of the actual sitemaps however i talked to the inspyder creaters and they are probably going to include a way to change the www to a subdomain for hosting sitemaps i=on subdomains in a future release

[soaringeagle]

gotta love inspyder i mentioned to them the problem with having to manually edit the sitemap index everytime and  in 24 hours they sent me a beta version that auto edits it so now all my sitemap updates can finaly r=un on autopilot

ive actualy beta tested a dozen versions and suggested several features including the multi threaded runs for faster speeds and a lower memory cost version

they always respond quickly and sometimes come out with new beta versions in hours

so ill be testing this and soon there will be a new version that will handle off site sitemaps flawlessly

[Mike]

Does the 3.2.6.2872 version include this?  What do I need to point to exactly?

[soaringeagle]

yes it does

on the upload settings tab put in the subdomain url where it says url replacement

then i added a link with a period or 1 px image to the sitemap and added the sitemao on the subdomain to the sitemap in ning etc as shown above

[soaringeagle]

after u do all that go back to webmaster tools (www profile) submit yiur ning sitemap that has 1 url to your subdokmain sitemap

wait a lil go to the subdomain profile under sitemaps u will see 2 tabs ..all found and mine submitted

go to the all found select the 1  and resubmit to make it live

[Mike]

I did that and google shows an error on that sitemap with just the single URL to the main sitemap:

Parsing error

We were unable to read your Sitemap. It may contain an entry we are unable to recognize. Please validate your Sitemap before resubmitting.

Here's what I have in my sitemap on Ning:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://sitemap.lifeaftermormonism.net/sitemap.gz</loc&gt;
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

[soaringeagle]

i opened the sitemap on the subdomain

that looks like a sitemap index with a single sitemap in it and that has www not sitemap subdomain

im not sure but that maybe the issue its pointing in circles

unless u have over 40,000 urls u dont need the index  if u do theres should be at least 2 sitemaps in it  and should have he subdomain

[Mike]

Ah, that makes sense.  I'm re-running the sitemap creator now with the proper exclusions, and with the sitemap domain pointing to the subdomain.  I'll not use an index if the new sitemap is less than 40k urls.  Thanks for all your help on this.  

[soaringeagle]

cool

when its done let me know if your still havin issues

over the nezt couple weeks track google bot activity increases the number of pages indexed increases and trafic increases to see just how much it helps

[⚡JFarrow⌁]

this is interesting

[soaringeagle]

i actualy tak]lked inspyder into making a beta version for me that ovrrides the url with the subdomain url

this is like the 5th or 6th time they made a beta for me to test to solve problems i found i]or improve it with suggestions i made

and they tend to fix isues i find in beta versions in minutes to maybe an hour

so i can finaly run it in tge background as a scheduled task