deborahbaker - 10:05 am on Nov 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

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".

Thanks for that. Yes that is exactly what I have but GWT is still saying "no sitemaps found for this site"
does anyone think it is because I have redirected www.mydomain.com/index.htm to www.mydomain.com/index.php? Is this bad practice?

deborahbaker - I've edited one of your earlier posts to remove a link to your site

Sorry it slipped in when I copied and pasted the results.

When I took a look, I saw that much of the content on your site is not unique

Yeah you are right and I know about unique content but I think due to the age etc of this site it has not been an issue. I have been gradually replacing it. You know when this site was developed Google did not even exist. It was just Yahoo and since its birth it has had number 1 placements. You are right I did copy some of the content because duplicate content was not an issue then. But a lot of it is my original content which has since been duplicated by other sites. Also my site gets plenty of new unique content everytime a product is uploaded there is a huge description added. I really dont think this is the reason for its recent problems and is one of the reasons I havent bothered too much about the content (if it aint broke dont fix it - which I really wish I hadnt done 6 months ago as I wouldnt be in this position now) I am sure it is one of the other reasons above that I am trying to resolve but I do take your point and I am going to change all the content. Incidentally since I changed the robot file my site is climbing back up the rankings. But I want to resolve all my above issues so please if anyone can help then post here.

One thing also, some pages you should "noindex, follow" for example your search results pages and your "tell a friend pages". (If the site I see is yours I see about 4000 or more tell a friend pages in the index)

Thanks I hadnt thought of this. I really have opened up a whole can of worms I now have to deal with.