sitemaps, one is .xml and one is .html

[amythepoet]

Ok finally Google is happy with my sitemap.xml and so am I.

Iam using google tools

and there is an X appearing next to my site-map.html

I don't know what to do,

If I delete it, it will be gone from my site entirely, I am just puzzled here

If someone could help I'd appreciate it very much

thank you again

[goodroi]

i would first change my sitemap from html to xml.

than i would make sure its not one of these three issues.

1) google glitch - google aint perfect and from time to time they will have a glitch that will fix itself.

2) invalid sitemap - check your sitemap with a online sitemap validator to make sure it is properly written. a single typo can cause havoc.

3) your site was/is down - if your hosting company isnt the most reliable it is possible for your website & sitemap to be unavailable when google tries to crawl it. simple solution is to make sure you have a good hosting company and use a site monitoring tool to ensure your site is always live.

[amythepoet]

I have one sitemap which is xml

I don't understand what you want me to do with the sitemap called html

it is called site-map.html and it appears on every page of my site, Im confused

[amythepoet]

also, my site-map.html, I believe is inside the folder called sitemap.xml, but am not sure

I don't want to mess up anything as my sitemap.xml is good now

[goodroi]

many, many years ago webmasters were having a hard time getting all the content indexed. they started to create a sitemap.html page. this page was simply a list of links to all the pages on the site. this helped search engines & users. however it was limited since it was html.

the search engines got together and agreed on a formal sitemap protocol. this one focused on xml files. this made it easier to upload sitemaps of thousands of urls and include bonus details like last modified. for more details about this check out the official site [sitemaps.org....]

you can have both html & xml. the html should be more for users and the xml should be for the search engines.

i wouldnt get too worried about either sitemap variety since if you have enough links you will not even need a sitemap. even if a sitemap gets more of your pages indexed, they won't rank for any competitive term without backlinks. sitemaps are helpful but imho you should keep your efforts in perspective and not forget the value of links.

[amythepoet]

ok thank you very much. I will do as you say, very good,

One m ore thing, I use google webmaster tools and on the sitemaps, there is a check, as in good next to the one that is called sitemap.xml but there is an X , as in BAD next to the one that is called site-map.html

I do not know how to delete that one as I said, that one is just for visitors to the website

should I just leave that alone?

thanks again for your help