Google Webmaster Tools - "your Sitemap is HTML" message

[cricketer]

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year!

Just curious to know if anyone is seeing "Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead." message in GWT as of the 7th of Jan'14 for the same sitemap that was previously accepted.

I've read in the past that this may be a bug and that is all I am able to find for the moment.

The sitemap is 100% all XML and is not showing any broken links either.

Any suggestions or news I may have missed over the holidays.

Best Regards,
PSC.

Happy for the moderator to move this post if required.

[adder]

cricketer, Happy New Year to you too and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

None of my sites seem to be affected by this bug. Do you use a plugin or a 3rd party application to generate your sitemap? It may be that the plugin is broken and produces an invalid XML.

Have you run your sitemap through any online XML Validator? (you can search for them - there are a few good free alternatives out there)

[netmeg]

Probly a bug. I'd wait a bit and see if GWT sorts it out (specially if it's the same sitemap that worked fine before)

[cricketer]

@adder Thank! :)

I am using a serverside plugin recommended by the bigG to generate the XML sitemap and managed to validate the XML on W3C XML validator. I will try the other ones online to triple check.

On a positive note the sitemap was accepted on a 2nd submission and reporting no issues at all. Am sure it was a bigG bug or GWT was on holidays.

@netmeg, yeah I read some articles talking about a bug in the past and check out some of the comments where some experienced it recently.

Thanks again for assisting with this one!