After posting my Geo Sitemap tutorial, I have had a difficult time getting my own Geo Sitemap, and my clients’ Geo Sitemaps to validate in Google Webmaster Tools.

If you add your Geo Sitemap to your general XML sitemap, it isn’t going to validate in Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll get this error:

“Status: Invalid XML tag,” as well as this line: “This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit.” followed by a reference to the line on the file containing the <geo> tag.

Apparently, even if you include Google’s geo namespace, their XML parser isn’t smart enough to figure out that the sitemap is referencing both regular web page, and a Geo Sitemap (KML file). Instead, Google recommends using a separate sitemap for every type of content that you have on your website (regular sitemap, Video Sitemap, Geo Sitemap, etc.). Here is an excerpt from an interesting discussion in Google Groups:

“One thing I would recommend is that you spit your URLs into separate Sitemap files based on the kind of content they’re pointing to. In other words, make a single Sitemap file just for your geo-content, and a different Sitemap file for (X)HTML / web-search based content. That makes it easier for us to recognize the kind of content that you’re pointing to.” 

The Solution

Here is the simplest solution:

• Create a Sitemap Index. Learn more about Sitemap Index files - basically a Sitemap Index file is used to list every sitemap on your website (for example, I have a sitemap in my root folder, and one in my blog directory that is generated automatically via a Wordpress plugin. Both are referenced in my Sitemap Index file.) Include links to each sitemap you plan to implement.
• Create a sitemap for each type of content on your website that you want search engines to index. I created sitemap.xml for my web pages, and geo-sitemap.xml for my KML Geo Sitemap.
• Submit all three to Google Webmaster Tools, and this time they will all validate.

From the sound of the Google Groups discussion, Webmaster Tools should eventually be smart enough to contain references to both kinds of content (which would make sense, considering Google’s official documentation says nothing about separating the two). For now though, it looks like we have to separate sitemaps based on content.