Sitemap error

[edward-may]

Hey Guys

Everytime I run the tester through google webmaster tools - I keep getting an error that tells me

"Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead."

An idea how to go about fixing this without changing the site around?

https://www.zenory.co.nz/sitemap

I have seen competitors sitemaps look similar to mine.

Cheers

[davebuts]

What you've submitted is your sitemap for human visitors - not a sitemap for search engines.

The sitemap that you submit to Webmaster Tools for search engines will be a .xml file. Eg. instead of https://www.zenory.co.nz/sitemap it would be https://www.zenory.co.nz/sitemap.xml

There are a few ways you can create a sitemap.xml for your site. You can use a program like Screaming Frog to crawl the site and generate a static sitemap. That is, a sitemap file that won't update automatically when you add new pages or posts - you will have to generate a new sitemap every time you add new content.

Depending on which CMS you are using you should be able to generate your sitemap.xml dynamically. That is, a sitemap file that updates itself as you add new content, which makes things a lot easier - especially on large sites!

You can find out more about XML Sitemaps and see a sample here: http://www.web-site-map.com/

It is important that you only include URLs in your sitemap that you want search engines to crawl. Don't include any pages that are no indexed or blocked by robots.txt.

[edward-may]

awesome thanks so much great info!