Bug Errors in sitemaps according to google

[RedWS600]

Over the last few days the amount of indexed pages in Google has dropped. The time the red line dropped is around the time I upgraded to the latest version of DBSEO, it may just be a coincidence.


I notice there is errors reported in the sitemaps. so looking at this closer, listing the sitemaps.

It is saying the following files are empty, however when I open them, they open fine.
www.solent-renegades.co.uk/dbseositemap.php?fn=dbseo_sitemap_album_7.xml.gz
www.solent-renegades.co.uk/dbseositemap.php?fn=dbseo_sitemap_tags_14.xml.gz
www.solent-renegades.co.uk/dbseositemap.php?fn=dbseo_sitemap_album_10.xml.gz

Has anyone else got a similar issue?

The website has had no downtime as far as i know, so when Google fetched the files it should have been up and running.

 

[RedWS600]

Another URL google has flagged up today is saying is empty.
www.solent-renegades.co.uk/dbseositemap.php?fn=dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz
I can only guess that at the time google requested this file, it was either in the process of being generated, or it served a blank file because of some other issue.
I have been running DBSEO for a long time, not come across this before. Google only gives me a date it requested the file not the time, so cant track it back in the logs.

 

[RedWS600]

Actually going by the logs. Its not showing up in the log that Google has requested this file recently. (not filtered on just GoogleBot incase there was an alternative name)

N/A
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 09:15, 21st Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 199.167.148.2
N/A
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 09:15, 21st Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 199.167.148.2
N/A
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.134 Safari/537.36 09:10, 21st Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 79.77.38.152
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 00:48, 20th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.192
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 21:11, 18th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.242
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 02:07, 17th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.242
Googlebot
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +Googlebot - Search Console Help) 18:23, 16th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 66.249.78.88
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 14:43, 13th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.242
Googlebot
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +Googlebot - Search Console Help) 11:14, 13th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 66.249.64.182
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 00:55, 12th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.242
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 15:29, 10th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.192
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 07:50, 7th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 65.55.213.192
msnbot
msnbot/2.0b (+Meet our crawlers) 22:42, 5th Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 199.30.16.74
Googlebot
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +Googlebot - Search Console Help) 23:04, 1st Jul 2015 dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz 66.249.64.55

So perhaps this helps track down the bug, as although Google has requested the file its not showing up in the log that it has been requested. Although if I manually request it in a browser it loads fine.

So now I use the Google console and get it to test the individual sitemap.
Sitemap: /dbseositemap.php?fn=dbseo_sitemap_cms_15.xml.gz
Type: Sitemap
Sitemap content
Web pages
274 Submitted
Error details: No errors found.

So its reading the file if I manually tell it to. Perhaps Google has a bug, or perhaps the website is serving blank sitemaps now and again (but I can't recreate)

 

[Fillip H.]

I can only guess that at the time google requested this file, it was either in the process of being generated, or it served a blank file because of some other issue.

That is most likely the issue, yeah

You can simply resubmit it manually from GWT (which, btw, doesn't affect your indexing speed, only what statistics you can see. This is why you don't see Googlebot requesting it even though GWT says it did.)

 

[RedWS600]

Resubmitted manually to GWT, it seemed to take it okay, and read the contents.

Will keep an eye on this to see if it happens again as not seen it in the past.

Thanks

 

[Fillip H.]

Hello RedWS600,

This ticket has now been closed with the status Not A Bug.

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