Submitting my sitemaps to Google proved a little more difficult than I expected. Sure the webmaster tools make the process of submitting the links to the sitemaps relatively easy, but attempting to resolve any issues you might have if things are not working are a little more difficult.

After I generated the sitemaps I then made my way over to the webmaster tools to submit them. I had to submit two sitemaps, one for mcnicholl.com and one for the blog. It seems to take google varying amounts of time to conduct the download and checking of the sitemaps so I didnt get instant feedback. When I did though, it wasnt what I was expecting. Both of my sitemaps got the following error :

URL timeout: DNS lookup timeout

This type of error would instantly tell me that I :

1. Had made a spelling mistake when typing in the URL to the sitemap
2. Had issues with my DNS servers

So in addressing these, I typed in the link I had supplied to google into the address bar of Firefox. This brought up the XML straight away. So the link was correct.

Next I checked out the situation with my DNS servers. I generated a report over at DNSStuff.com. This did explain some issues with my DNS servers, but when I mentioned these to my webhost they said I had nothing to worry about.

At this stage I was puzzled. What is causing this error?

After continually submitting the same link to google in the vain hope that it might magically work, I contacted my host again for some troubleshooting advice. Needless to say my sitemaps are working perfectly now. It turns out that there was an issue with the folder permissions in place. After having these reset – everything was working perfectly.

Now, after I submit a new post to the blog the sitemap is updated and google gets a ping all at the same time.

Categories: Google, Sitemap

Since it is very important to submit a sitemap to google, I made it one of my top priorities. So I created a one for www.mcnicholl.com based on their xml schema. This wasnt to difficult. When it came to creating a sitemap for this blog, I decided that it didnt make productive sense to continually update a sitemap after every post – so I hit google for some wordpress plugin options.

Here are the ones I found :

• Social Patterns
  
• Dagon Design
• Arne Brachhold

This isnt an exhaustive list, just the ones that came to me first. Maybe someone can let me know of a better one down the line. I plumped in the end for Arne Brachholds sitemap generator as it fitted my requirements and didnt over complicate anything.

Categories: Google, Sitemap