I get the following message when auditing my site
Finding Evidence Action
Only an HTML “sitemap” page; no XML sitemap detected HTML sitemap at /sitemap/ lists >180 links but cannot be submitted in Search Console • HTML sitemaps are unsupported for XML submission (Google, n.d.).
Potential absence of robots.txt
Does any one know who to resolve. I am using Rapid Weaver 8
Fetch attempt returned “Website unavailable” Psychologists & Expert Witnesses
I had a similar error with the generated sitemap. Couldn’t work out how to resolve it in RW so went to this site and generated a new site map for my published site and then replaced the one on the server. Worked fine after that, I just have to remember to copy the file over again after I have published it, or run it again if I have changed the actual layout etc.
Woops. Maybe I am wrong. The link you posted is for the robots.txt file. In the Page Inspector under Meta Tags do you have Enable Robot Meta Tags ticked?
We have started to use xml-sitemaps.com too because of this problem. No sure about how to put this on the server as we do not have one. We ran the site through Chat GPT for an SEO audit and while Chat GPT can come up with errors these problems have been identified consistently in other SEO platforms this what Chat GPT said “Generate a clean robots.txt and submit updated XML sitemaps in Search Console after major changes.” We have several sites and they are all overdue for maintenance and update. We are trying to work out whether these issues can be resolved or whether to just start again on another platform such as WordPress or Wix. We have used Rapid Weaver for many years so ideally would like to resolve matters without having to learn a new content management platform but there are several things we just cannot resolve. I have just gone back and checked each page and under Page Inspector under Meta Tags I have Enable Robot Meta Tags ticked. If there is somewhere else where this should be ticked please advise.
When I say put it on the server what I meant was to transfer the sitemap file that you generated to the directory on your host server where RW publishes all the files and overwrite the file that RW put there.
Not sure if this is the solution but I am sure that there is one. I looked at both Wordpress and Wix a couple of years ago and decided to stay with RW. Am sure someone who knows more than me will chime in with an answer on Monday
We have decided to stay with RW for now as this is what we know and what everything is built on. However, finding support is a problem. We cannot recruit website developers with expertise in RW. I am not an IT professional by training but have needed to learn. I will come back to you with screenshots of the directory where the files are published. The one thing that struck me is that the website is constantly changing so I would be constantly updating this directory?
Hi @Sankofa,
If by “directory” you mean Google and the likes, then yes: they will automatically rescan your website for changes and index them. But it will give priority to the pages you’ve listed in sitemap.xml, and ignore the ones you’ve marked to not be indexed.
If by “directory” you mean the literal directory on the server where you site resides in, then yes: you need to update the sitemap.xml file each time you add, move, rename or delete a page, if you don’t autogenerate the sitemap file through some automated means (RW’s built-in generator, or something like the SEO Helper stack’s sitemap function).
If you use a service like xml-sitemaps.com you will need to have it rescan your site after every change where pages get added, renamed, moved or removed. If you install their on-server PHP script you can simply rescan your site by visiting the URL to that script once it’s installed (and you can even automate that if you’d really need to).
In both cases you don’t need to point the engines to the new sitemap in their respective consoles - search engines will find the updated automatically the next time it scans your site.
Cheers,
Erwin