WordPress MU

Hey all,

Has anybody out there had issues with Google's Webmaster tools saying their sitemap doesn't exist, when really it does?

I'm using the sitemap generator from Followta:
http://followta.com/blog/blog/2009/07/20/sitemap-for-wpmu-2-8-1-plugin-comes-out/

The tool works beautifully, but when I downloaded it, it contained all the pages on all subdomains in the WPMU install, which was pretty easy to fix up.

However, now that I tried to add a sitemap to Google Webmaster tools, I'm getting a "General HTTP error: 404 not found", which is interesting because the "See Sitemap" link opens the link above, to a fully functioning sitemap (to me and likely other humans, anyway).

Does anybody know whether the sitemap being virtually created could make a difference to Google's webmaster tools spider?

In case you're interested, here is the sitemap, which works fine:

http://giantsquid.ca/sitemap.xml

FYI, I have registered the site in Webmaster Tools as giantsquid.ca and not http://www.giantsquid.ca, so that part should be valid.

Is there a possibility that Google's robots protocol is slightly different than a browser's, making it unable to see the virtual sitemap?

Any answers would be really appreciated - I've been trying to figure this out for days and it's quite frustrating! :(

Thanks,
Steve

As a follow-up, somebody in the Google Webmaster forums pointed out that a comprehensive URL testing tool for my sitemap shows that the response headers for the sitemap show a 404 error (http://tools.briefer.net/build1.php?uri=http://giantsquid.ca/sitemap.xml&ua=3&http=1.1&con=close&method=GET&data=1).

Anybody know why I might be able to actually see the sitemap in a browser, but get a 404 error when a bot like briefer.net or googlebot looks at it? It must have something to do with the server configuration, the rewrite that I'm using or the wpmu/sitemap software...but I can't figure it out...

While this thread is probably long-dead, I'll post a solution for the greater good...

As the above case shows, you can have a perfectly fine sitemap generating and still get a 404 error from Google. That's because Wordpress is serving up the 404 slightly before serving up the sitemap. Tricky, tricky, but here's two solutions:

(1) Give Google the underlying feed template path. In the case above, it would be: http://giantsquid.ca/index.php?feed=sitemap

(2) Edit the feed template file and throw the following code up at the top. It has PHP send out a "we're all good here" header that solves the 404 problem.

header('HTTP/1.1 200 OK');

Have you fixed it yet? I ask as it appears it;s still returning a 404 when w3 tries to access it.

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