Is Google right or vBSEO Sitemap Generator?

In Google Webmaster Tools I get the information that the sitemap is not submitted to Google:



However, I get an email every day from vBSEO Sitemap that everything is fine:

Hello!

The vBSEO Google/Bing Sitemap has been successfully generated for your vBulletin forums at:
AMD Forum (http://www.amdforum.se)

Report:
============================
Click the following link for your vBSEO Google/Bing Sitemap Report:
vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemap for vBulletin

Summary:
============================
Forum Display: 97
Show Thread: 3095
Show Post:
Member Profiles:
Poll Results:
Blog Entries: 78
Blog Tags:
Album URLs:
Social Groups URLs:
Tag URLs:
Archive: 0

Total Indexed URLs: 3925
Total Processing Time: 3.28 seconds

Google ping: Successful.
Bing ping: Successful.
Yahoo ping: Successful.
Ask ping: Successful.

Does it work correct or not?

The PING was sucessful, but there are errors in the sitemap files themselves.

click through to get the actual error message.

Thanks for your reply Brian.

Okay, then I have a problem here. According to Google there is a problem with the "crawl speed". I have increased it but it does not help. And how do I contact Google about it? My webhost says thet have not changed anything on the server.

What is the actual error message that is displayed?

This one:

Problems with the crawl rate
We were unable to retrieve the file with your Sitemap due to the crawl rate used for your server. To learn more about how to increase the crawl rate, visit our Help Center.

Interesting... never seen that one before.

I would suggest to
a) reduce the number of urls per sitemap file in the sitemap generator options pane (smaller files load faster)
b) put the webmaster tool setting back to 'let google decide'

But is this slow then:

Total Processing Time: 3.90 seconds

I don't seem to have any timestamps in webmaster tools to compare against.

This isn't the generation time.. it's the LOAD time when called via a url. .com/sitemap_forum_X.xml.gz

I see. What do you think is the cause of this problem? I have never had this problem before.

Brian, I removed the sitemap in Webmaster Tools and readded it and now it works fine. Weird.

Keep an eye on it for a few days and see what happens.

It didn't help to remove and re add the sitemap as I tried to do.

Brian, for your reference:

I have received an answer from Google and they could see in logs that Google bot was banned.

Hello from Google,
Thanks for contacting us.
Looking at our logs GNAX started blocking googlebot IPs yesterday.
Please help resolve this by contacting them.

I contacted my web host and they have removed the ban and made sure it will not happen again. It was a mistake. Now everything works fine again.

Glad they were able to figure this out