Sitemap is not fetchable by Google Search

Hi guys, I know there are a lot of posts like this. I did all of the suggested methods in those old posts but none of that works, some of that are:

  • Wait for google to fetch again. I waited for a long time
  • Using 3rd party sitemap checker. They can fetch it.
  • Make sure it’s 200. Yes, I can manually fetch my sitemap.xml site without any problems.

I use the default sitemap.xml that hugo generated for me but google still cannot fetch it. Here’s the link to the sitemap https://teambaconn.github.io/sitemap.xml

My baseUrl is “https://teambaconn.github.io/

Any help would be appreciated. I don’t want to manually having to request index everytime I create a new post. That’s the whole point of sitemap right?

Open a google search tools account and upload your sitemap manually: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

I uploaded my sitemap manually to google search tool and it failed so thats why I know my sitemap is not fetchable by google search.

Copy paste HERE what Google did output to make you understand it is “not fetchable by google search”. The exact output with all details it offers.

Explain how you know when Google fetches. Does your server send you a log message when a bot identified as Google tried to connect to it?

Which one? Headers? Detailled output of the request headers?

How do you ensure that a request coming from one of Google’s IP addresses receives a 200 response? Manually fetching the file does not imply Google’s servers receive a 200.

There are plenty of posts recently that indicate that there are more substantial issues for Google to connect to any sitemap hosted on github.io.

Make sure to not have any “bot blocking” enabled, any “privacy enhancing” tools etc. Google’s sitemap checker is a bot and it’s most certainly on privacy “enthusiast’s” lists.

My working theory is that Github blocks Google Bot. To work around this you might want to add Cloudflare or any other cache/proxy that is put between visitors and the website itself and then have that cache deliver the sitemap.

Or maybe switch from Github pages to Cloudflare pages or Netlify Hosting or any other free service.

By the way, all these answers are based on the information you provide. Which is not much, missing exact errors, how you identify that “it’s not working”, etc. More information and logs always help solve issues.

  1. I don’t know when google will fetch it. But I waited for a long time it failed to fetch and try fetching again would mean nothing

I use google search console to manually request google to fetch my xml. It return the results like this. I click inside it but found no reason why google did not accept it.

  1. Remove the sitemaps 2-4 from Search Console
  2. Readd /sitemap.xml
  3. Click on the sitemap to check if Search Console finds adresses