lucy24 - 5:13 pm on Nov 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

I checked my sitemap and got an error "Missing "charset" attribute for "text/xml" document" I did a bit of research and was even more confused as to whether to use an internal DTD or external DTD or whatever.

Is it xml? It should look like this, minus the {braces}. Note the first line. Question marks are part of the format.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="{blahblah}">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
{ <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> }
</url>
{ et cetera }
</urlset>

blahblah = http: // www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 (without spaces). I thought this was the people that made my sitemap, but it's the exact format from google's how-to page. NOT your own sitename here! That goes in place of "example.com".

{ changefreq } one of several optional tags. They don't do anything, but you might include them for your own information.

{ et cetera } repeat the url package for each page you want to list. You do not need to list every single page; in fact you don't need a sitemap at all unless you've got backwaters that a robot might not find.

Oh, yes, and unless your URLs contain non-ASCII characters --not likely if your site is English-- the charset declaration won't change anything. It will just make the search engines happy.