Hello,
I’m trying to sort out my presence on Google. I am working on my sitemap…I keep getting this error report ‘This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location’. Please can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?
http://deborahgriceartist.uk/sitemap.xml
Thanks, Debbie
Most likely it’s because the link you included above (and likely submitted to Google) is http://deborahgriceartist.uk, but all of the pages in your sitemap.xml file are http://www.deborahgriceartist.uk. Google treats them as different websites.
A couple of things I noticed:
You should choose whether you want your site to have the www on the front of it or not. If so, you need to be consistent. Whichever you choose (there really isn’t a right answer), enter it into your RW settings. You should also create/edit your .htaccess file to redirect the one you don’t choose to the one you do choose.
You have an SSL certificate installed on the server for your domain. You should be using it. Change http: in your General settings and your publishing settings to https:. You should also create/edit your .htaccess file to redirect the non-SSL URLs to SSL.
You can search the forum for help on htaccess or if you have specific questions when you get to that part, ask here and someone will help you. Just let us know which choice you make for #1 above.
Thank you so much for your help, I’ve got it sorted out. I really appreciate your input. My next task is to sort out my webpage results on Google Homepage. Please can you tell me where I need to input the correct information in RW settings, I’m getting some nonsensical stuff which is really quite frustrating…please see my screenshot…Thanks so much, Debbie
Those are referred to as Google Sitelinks. You don’t have direct control of what Google picks or displays for them.
Search Google for Sitelinks, and you’ll find a lot of information about them and ways you can try to help Google display what you want.
Not totally true… Google will “choose” what to display in site links, but will usually use your “meta titles” and “meta descriptions” if they are properly formatted
If you do this properly, Google will usually use your suggestions, instead of picking content from your page.
True as far as titles and descriptions being used to display within the sitelinks, but as far as what pages (sitelinks) Google chooses to show is not under our control.
Titles and Snippets(descriptions) are totally at Google’s discretion.
Title (<title> tag):
However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query.
The Snippets (or Description) is more and more being generated by on-page content:
Snippets are automatically created from page content. Snippets are designed to emphasize and preview the page content that best relates to a user’s specific search: this means that a page might show different snippets for different searches
Google sometimes uses
<meta>tag content to generate snippets, if we think they give users a more accurate description than can be taken directly from the page content.
Google is also relying more and more on structured data to influence search results.
More info can be found here:
To me, what Google puts up for you is really good, you’re quite lucky that your information is presented so well by Google… your picture that you pasted above shows a very clear good example of Google at work… I’d be grateful because I myself did a lot of work to provide titles and descriptions using SEO Helper, the stack that does SEO… and I get lousy titles and descriptions out of google… they use my worst stuff… from the page… I’m envious you get such good stuff out of them.
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