Help with sitemaps

From the 15th of this month the google bots have stopped visiting my forum and I keep getting this error message in webmaster tools:
- We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure that your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location which you provided and then resubmit.Have deleted all the gz files and ran the generator again but it's still the same.
This has only happened since the update of vbseo!

Any help will be appreciated.

Alex

Hello,

What is your URL of your sitemap?

Also, you can try to remove all of the .gz files in your vbseo_sitemap/data folder and regenerate, and resubmit to Google to see if this corrects the issue.

Your sitemap file looks fine.

Is your robots.txt file blocking googlebot?
Have you had down time?
Is your host blocking google?

Hi Michael

It's http://www.canon-fodder-forums.com/sitemap_index.xml.gz

I've already deleted the gz files from that folder and regenerated, but it didn't help.

Brian, all bots are allowed to visit.
Had some down time for about 15mins the other day there when I was trying to sort this out and changed the .htaccess file after reading about it on here, my hosting company got that sorted for me though.

Hello Alex,

As Brian stated, your sitemap does appear to be correct. Have you tried to remove the sitemap and re-adding it inside of your webmaster tools?

Not tried to delete it yet, just done the above and then resubmitted.
Should I go ahead and just delete and then resubmit a new sitemap?

If you have had that error for a few days now, that is what I would do.

I'll give that a try then as I've had errors for 9 days now.

Please let us know how it turns out.

Getting the same error message but now with : URL timeout: robots.txt timeout.

Strange. Please try adding this into the bottom of your robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.canon-fodder-forums.com/sitemap_index.xml.gz

I've done that Michael, will it take long to have an effect?

What you added should not fix the issue, however, it will help with search engines finding your sitemap. I will flag this thread for a developer to see if they can see anything different from Brian and myself.

Thanks for your help Michael & Brian.