False Warning/Errors in GWT

[netmeg]

I logged into my GWT account just now and just about had a heart attack. I have something around 125 sites in there, belonging to me and/or my clients, and at least a third of them have little red WARNING or ERROR marks next to the sitemap entry. Almost all of them are hosted here. But when I click on them, it says "No errors or warnings found". Anyone else? This seems to go from tiny one-page yellowpages type sites with static sitemaps up to my bigger ecommerce sites with auto-generated XML files.

[trinorthlighting]

I would contact google about that. Google must be somehow picking up that you manage all of those sites.

Do you use some automated program to search your urls out and submit the site map to google?

[netmeg]

Only for the larger sites; we have a php script that generates the sitemap on the fly when Google comes to ask for it.

The thing is, some of these have been in there for months if not years without being touched and never throwing off errors before. Quite weird.

[bwnbwn]

We are on a windows server and it is updated then restarted by our IT depatment at 12 pm on a weekend. I had the same issue a week or so ago as I assume the bot was trying to access most of the sites while the server was rebooting, the bot was kicked out and a bad response code sent me by webmaster tools as warings on about 50 or so sites.

Check to see if the server had any issues about that time I bet that is the issue and the error messages will go away.

[tedster]

I think there's a coding problem - several of the sprites that indicate various things are out of position for me today.

[netmeg]

I'm not sure I understand what that means, tedster...?

The other weird thing that happens today is about half the time I try to access either my adsense or my adwords account, I get a message about the SSL certificate for .google-analytics.com being out of date as of Saturday.

[tedster]

Google uses CSS Sprites [webmasterworld.com] for those little icons. Instead of having a small graphic for each "icon" they all get combined into one graphic file. That way there are fewer http requests, and that means a faster page load and server response.

But the code has to tell your browser where to position the view of the big file to show any particular image or icon, and I noticed some wrong positioning today.

[trinorthlighting]

You might have a corrupt script wrote for your site maps. I would check there first. I can see where a hacker might want to target script like that and drop links to their own website.

[netmeg]

You might have a corrupt script wrote for your site maps. I would check there first. I can see where a hacker might want to target script like that and drop links to their own website.

No, I don't think it's that.

Today when I click on the WARNING link, it's saying that I've got the same priority set for all urls. But in most cases, I haven't. And I get the same message on sites that only have one url.

Also today a friend of mine in the same industry, who has a single one page site emailed me all concerned because he has the same message in his GWT account - he only has one site and one url, and it's complaining that all the priorities are set the same, so I think it must be some kind of a bug or something.

[ray19833]

Yesterday i had the same problem...Warning in Google sitemaps, but no error was shown. Today i checked it and the error said that i did set all the priority numbers the same. I changed it and now it works fine, don't now if helped you with this, but it was worth a shot. Good luck.

(edit: Netmeg is replying with the same answer, sorry)

[WW_Watcher]

Nutmeg, why would you create a sitemap for a single page site?
I can understand having an account for a site, and have it verified to possibly get messages, but a sitemap for a single page?

[travelin cat]

Same here: a warning in Google sitemaps, but no error was shown in details

[trinorthlighting]

Have you recently run that script to see what the script actually produces to google code wise?

[netmeg]

(netmeg)

It's automatic with the sites we host here. And some of the sites had more pages, but are now down to one.

Yes, I know exactly what the script provides. It's not just us; I'm getting emails and reports that this is happening all over the place.

[Draganfly]

Moderator note: moved from another location

I'm wondering what to do about the new warnings that have appeared in Google Webmaster Tools about our site maps. All 3 sitemaps now have a warning next to them saying that all the pages have the same priority

Google:

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.

I have all the priorities auto-set to 1 and we use an automatic sitemap generator (iArchitect) that works great.

What do other people do about this? Am I to have the sitemap generator give a priority of 0.9 to all pages then go and edit the resulting sitemap to make our home page priority of 1?

This is just a new warning appearing for us.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:29 pm (utc) on June 25, 2008]

[netmeg]

I'm wondering if it isn't a bug.

[wingslevel]

I also got a bunch of warnings today:

> All the URLs in your Sitemap are marked as having dynamic content.

Never had that one before. not sure why, I don't have bad url structure with lots of query strings like =, & etc.

Hoping there is a bug.....

[wingslevel]

and here too:

[webmasterworld.com...]

anybody else?

[Atomic]

Yes, I have the same silly warnings.

[Bewenched]

I had one the other day that said a page had a high load time which i'd never seen before. page loaded fine for me and very quickly. so I re-submitted the sitemap.

[tedster]

I had one the other day that said a page had a high load time...

Never seen that one before. Guess that settles the question once and for all about whether Google measures page load, eh?