Error Even With Validated Sitemap

[andrewshim]

I encountered errors in my sitemap :

Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit. [?]

I validated my sitemap with 2 tools and they seem to be okay. Sample of sitemap follows :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 [google.com...]

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap.php</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/learningCenter.php</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>

Checking with my webhost, and my logs, I don't find any bot has been denied access, but Googlebot has stopped downloading my robots.txt and stopped crawling my site.

Is this error caused by my webhost blocking (unintentionally)?

Is the sitemap.php (used for regular visitors viewing) being confused as the sitemap.xml by google?

Should I remove my sitemap.xml altogether?

[cmarshall]

I am not a sitemap expert, but all a validation will tell you is that the XML is well-formed and conforms to a schema.

It sounds like your problem is actually with the contents of the sitemap. I'm guessing that the embedded URI points to a page/site that does not meet some follow-through requirement. Maybe the URI itself has a problem, or the robots.txt file has issues. I dunno.