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Google errors

ercatliercatli ✭
edited May 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I have a website (still pretty incomplete) which has html/css pages as the front end and a Vanilla forum attached. I prepared a sitemap and registered with Google Sitemaps. I now have a report from Google saying that about a dozen of my pages could not be properly read by Googlebot (love that word!), including a number of the Vanilla files. Checking the detail reveals that some pages seem to be Google inventions (e.g. vanilla/styles/vanilla/.DS_Store and vanilla/url), neither of which seem to exist. These get a "404 page not found error", not unreasonably. But some other files which do exist get a "4xx error" which means that Google couldn't properly read the file because of "HTML errors". All of the vanilla files in this category are folders (not much html in there!!?), but some of my own html pages are also get the 4xx error. So, has anyone had a similar experience with vanilla? Is it just a Google glitch, or should I be worrying (especially about my html pages)? Any ideas would be helpful thanks.

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    WallPhoneWallPhone
    How did you generate that sitemap? Was it done with the Google Sitemap tool? 404 is not a 'HTML error', its an problem at the protocol level. 4xx errors usually relate to wrong credentials, file name, etc. The source of the errors could be problems in your page source if the sitemap tool misread the page addresses from your HTML. Open up the sitemap.xml (I believe thats the name) and see what the sitemap generator told Google should exist.
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    ercatliercatli ✭
    I'm an idiot! :( .DS store files are Mac hidden files that store info on folder windows. I used the Googe sitemap tool, but I didn't know how to run it on my server, so I ran it on my copy of the website on my own computer. So the sitemap generator included all those hidden files which aren't (of course) on the server. But I still have other problems, which must be my poor coding. I'll check out the sitemap xml file as you suggest.
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    WallPhoneWallPhone
    I think there was a PHP translation of the sitemaps tool made way back when sitemaps was released... you may want to try that.

    Oh, and don't forget to remove anything from your servers public folders that should not be in google--i.e old versions, notes to self, etc. (speaking from experience here)
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