Sitemap error
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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
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awesome thanks so much great info!
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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.
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