BANS Sitemap Issues – Resolved
Hi All -
Lately, if you log into your Google Webmaster tools, you have seen this dreaded warning next to your sitemap file:
All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority.
All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority). Priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact your site’s performance in search results. If all URLs have the same priority, Google can’t tell which are more important.
Sonjay, a Moderator on the BANS forum and Master of Website Design and Development, has written the solution and posted a new sitemap.php file with the fix. You can download the zip version here, and replace the sitemap.php file in to main folder of your bans site.
Mark
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
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- Build a Niche Store Sitemap and Content or Store Pages Addition
- Can aLinks Cause Site Issues? Obviously!
- Converting an Existing BANS ePN Site to a BANS PepperJam Site
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Wow, I had no idea this was even an issue. Never heard from the BANS folks about it. Thanks Mark!
Must we re-submit after replacing the new sitemap?
I’ve redone the sitemap (although I never got “All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority.”) But what I do get is “We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header.” if I upload the Google html file.
Now although I contacted Hostgator who said that I likely need to contact the script authors for a fix along these lines (ie, Kevin & Adam) and that Hostgator weren’t able to fix it, I decided to use the meta tag verification method instead and this works fine. No idea why, but it might be useful for someone if they’re having trouble.
@ Costa -
There should be no need to resubmit the sitemap – Google will find it on their next visit to the xml doc.
@ Cherie -
The 404 issue is rather signifigant as we are returning status 200 (Page found and OK) messages to browsers (and search engines) even when a page does not exist.
I have contacted Kelvin about it as well… and I assume there will need to be a code tweak in order to get it returning the proper status codes. It may be something as simple as a change in the htaccess file, but I have not looked into myself yet either.
Mark
That’s great, thanks for posting it up.
Had 3 sites showing that error and was starting to worry about it.
I’ve now had an update from Hostgator to the 404 error and this is their reply:-
The only other method to produce a proper 404 page that is not our status 200 page would be to set a custom “ErrorDocument” directive for 404 pages in your .htaccess file and have a custom page designed to handle errors. For instance you could create a directory called error and put an httperror.php script in there to handle errors, and then add the following directive to your .htaccess file to pass errors to this page :
ErrorDocument 404 /error/httperror.php
So this may help further
Hi all,
Could someone explain further this 404 issue please?
thanks, Mark – done!
Help!
I’ve updated the sitemap.php file on two of my sites and now all of my sites are returning a 500 internal sever error message.
Nevermind, it worked, but Hostgator just happened to go down at the same time. They came back a few minutes later. Talk about scaring the hell out of me!
I’ve tried this fix and I’ve tried the upgraded code from BANS and I’m still getting sitemap warnings. (“All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority. “) The odd thing is that I’ve gone so far as to comment out the line for priority and Google still gives the same error. According to Google and sitemap.org priority is optional. Still looking for a solution that works.
Mike
@Mike
I the BANS sites that I have worked on, the htaccess file had a rewrite rule for siteMap.xml to be sitemap.php. But when I visited siteMap.xml through browser sometimes I would see the siteMap.xml file that was in the store files and not sitemap.php. I don’t know why there was two sitemaps. (a static and a dynamic). If you visited sitemap.xml you’d get different results.
After this sitemap.php update I changed the rule htaccess to lowercase to sitemap.xml and deleted the siteMap.xml file so I knew for sure that sitemap.php would be the only one. Also resubmitted to google was lowercase. I suppose you could just point your robots.txt and google webmaster tools to sitemap.php instead.
I can’t seem to get this sitemap fix to work on my site. I deleted sitemap.php in Cpanel file manager & then uploaded the new sitemap.php to my site using GoFTP. I checked that it uploaded correctly.
Google is still giving me the same warning i.e.
“All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority). Priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact your site’s performance in search results. If all URLs have the same priority, Google can’t tell which are more important.”
I’ve tried this a few times. This is driving me nuts! Any suggestions?
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