Hello, I found this post and was having similar troubles and I found a solution that may help the OP or possibly someone else and I hope it’s okay to post what I learned. For background, I host with ipage and I simply use the Ecwid starter site as my home page. The domain I own, for simplicity, is mydomain.com. my starter site and store is at the subdomain
www.mydomain.com using the CNAME function within the DNS of mydomain.com at ipage to link app.ecwid.com to www.
I use .htaccess thru the ipage control panel to redirect mydomain.com to
www.mydomain.com so vistors are taken directly into the starter site/store. Because of the ecwid dynamic system I use this sitemap generator app to generate the sitemap so I could hopefully use the google webmasters tools and such.
Now in the google webmasters, under the site mydomain.com, I used the ADD/TEST button in the sitemaps section to add the store_sitemap.xml location, the app generated file. I got an error saying the file could not be found and when you clicked on the store_sitemap link on the error page, the new pop up window gave the bad file as
www.mystore.comstore_sitemap.xml.
Notice how there is no “/” between .com and store. I tried every way to solve this and nothing. It drove me nuts. I went to my ipage file manager and created the store_sitemap.xml file as the app instruction suggest, from the download the app provided, into the root directory thinking google would find it and still the same error. Ugh! I tried everything and never could get google to find the sitemap for mydomain.com. and thus I’ve had no data whatsoever on anything. Zero clicks registered, zero pages indexed. Nothing.
Then it hit me to try adding
www.mydomain.com to google websmasters so now there are two sites, mydomain.com and
www.mydomain.com in the control panel. And if you type those URL’s directly into your browser and hit enter, you will get two different locations if you are using ecwid and the starter site like I am.
However, I could not get google webmasters to verify my ownership of
www.mydomain.com thru any of their options until I used the domain provider option. With ipage, under DNS you can Modify a TXT/SPF Record and simply copy the google info provided into a new TXT and google verified my ownership. I tried using all the other files and options and just didn’t find any files. But that one worked.
So now with
www.mydomain.com verified I did the ADD sitemap to this new www version but this time I got the error that it was an html file and not xml and it failed again. I then realized that ecwid(?) automatically forwards all old links on the web to your home page so you don’t have missing or broken links. but it also converts the xml to the standard homepage.html file and everyone is sent to
www.mydomain.com even though the url at the top says/www.mydomain.com/store_sitemap.xml.. Google looks for the url of the sitemap but ecwid forwards it to my homepage so google rejected the sitemap again.
Now, here’s what is crazy. I switched back to using just the mydomain.com and under the sitemap instead of having the error it used to have all of my pages and pictures have now been indexed. But what’s even crazier if you once again click the store_sitemap.xml link on the sitemap page, it takes you again to the link with the missing “/” and thus an error page. But the sitemap is there and the app has loaded it properly. And as they said, Yes it’s working. It just doesn’t seem like it. But my pages have been indexed whereas a few minutes before they hadn’t.
And what boggles my mind more is there are no stats or anything on the mydomain.com webmaster side but when you switch over to
www.mydomain.com there is now analytic data that I’ve been looking for. So in all this confusion, I found on google websmasters, if your domain is just mydomain.com, make sure you also verify ownership of
www.mydomain.com. And one of them my get the sitemap to work and the other may provide you the analytics. Maybe what I discovered is just s fluke or a quirk but if the info helps anyone save any of the stress or frustration I went thru then typing this was worth it.
Btw, now that I figured out my situation, thanks for the app!!!
03-01-2017, 07:33 AM
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