Google Webmaster tools shows errors on my .xml.gz. Says it's not a supported format!

Hello everyone!

I just upgraded from vBulletin 3.8 to 4.1.3 and vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold with XML Sitemap Generator 3.0 PL1, and i've noticed my sitemap file is not beeing accepted by Google anymore. It simply says:

Unsupported file format
Your Sitemap does not appear to be in a supported format. Please ensure it meets our Sitemap guidelines and resubmit.

Initially i've opened a ticket for support, but the answer from tech suport was something like "Your sitemaps are fine, but your network is slow. Contact your host".

This can't be true, as everything was fine before upgrading to vB 4.1.3 and vBSEO 3.6.0. I am having the same hardware (Dual Xeon 16GB RAM RAID5), the same connection (dual Gigabit) and the same latency to Google (4ms). It's a dedicated server with latest Apache (2.2), latest php (5.3.6)... I have tested the bandwith, the speed, everything looks more than fine.

I've tried reinstalling vBSEO and XML Sitemap Generator. Rebuild the sitemap. Nothing worked. Before the upgrade, i've had over 650.000 URL's in sitemaps with no problems. Now, even after excluding posts, archive, etc... i get errors even for 70.000 URL's. I also tried reducing the Max URL Numbers in one .xml.gz from 50.000 to 10.000, with no help. Google still shows them with errors "unsupported format"...

What else can i do?
Thanks in advance!

P.S. I will also attach a screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools...

Anybody?

As stated via ticket, all your files load correctly which means they are being generated correctly which puts the error somewhere on your network or several level.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

As stated via ticket, all your files load correctly which means they are being generated correctly which puts the error somewhere on your network or several level.

How can you say the files are correctly generated? Look how my sitemap_forum_3.xml.gz looks (for example)... It's completelly ruined!

P.S. Sorry, i've packed the sitemap_forum_3.xml.gz inside a .zip as it wouldn't let me upload .gz file.

What are your character encoding settings?

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

What are your character encoding settings?

I was looking inside vBulletin Options and couldn't find "character econding settings". phpmyadmin says MySQL connection collation is utf8_general_ci. I also took a look at all my tables, and most of them are in utf8_general_ci, except some that are in latin1_swedish_ci (arround 30%). I have no clue why they are in latin1_swedish_ci... Is this the issue?

Well, i took the advice of ticketing support and did the following:

1. disabled vBulletin Admincp > Scheculed Tasks > vBSEO Sitemap Generator task
2. deleted all existing sitemap files from vbseo_sitemap/data folder
3. created a cron on server to run the /forum/vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_sitemap.php on root
4. submitted manually on Webmaster Tools
5. waited for submit to finnish

The result: 3 sitemaps are still in urecognized format!

What else can i do to fix this problem?

Please supply login details on the ticket so we can investigate further

Thank you for your great tech support! It's finally working as it should!