Sitemap Generator Forum

I have had a message back to say that the sitemap I created doesnt validate and so is not recognised, I look around the web and pretty much worked it out that because my url strings have '&' and not '&', this is what's causing the problems.

eg.
[ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]

[ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]

But in fairness when the sitemap was produced they where '&' and not '&' and when I checked the url by copy and pasting it into the address bar, some of my values being generated by the url values didnt appear.

You will see what I mean when you check the link out below and then the one below it.

[ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]

in that one the page title and h1 tag contains the country and the region

if then you add & instead of the & they dont show.

[ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]

My worry is that if I change all the &'s back to &amp's in the xml sitemap file to allow it to validate will it mean that those bits of data reading from the url string will not appear, as in honesty they are very important bits of SEO.

Any help will be good

Cheers

Hello,

per sitemaps protocol ( [ External links are visible to logged in users only ] ) the URLs in sitemap are changed (including replacing & with & ), so that is correct - the URLs should not be directly entered in browser as is.

Hi,

could you explain a little further please. Are you saying that yes I change the '&'s' back '&'s' and then re-submit the sitemap, so that it validates correctly.

But what are your opinions on them disrupting the different SEO outputs, as basically all those country and regions in the titles and H1 tags are the point, or is is the case that its not that its the &amp's that are causing but some internal code issue.

Cheers