I was working in Adwords… sorry, Google Ads, all morning
and noticing that things were a little on the slow side.
Of course, in the case of Google Ads, “on the slow
side” really means “on the slower side” since that new dashboard
always takes forever to load.
Anyways, after I saved up some work, I went to add an event
into my calendar and then the fun started happening.
After adding a meeting, I got a message saying that the
calendar couldn’t create this event and to please try again later.
I X’d out the notification, and then it popped up again. And
again. And again.
Nothing like a spin around the block.
Finally, I refreshed the page and that’s when I got hit with
that little 404 message up there.
Definitely not something I’ve seen before – nor expecting
from Google.
Usually, that company gets pretty creative with its error messages and pages not found. Just check out what happens with Chrome when you try to browse and you’re not connected to the internet.
Why is it apps always seem to break when you need them the
most? Here’s hoping it comes back to life soon.
They play an essential role in WordPress SEO by telling Google and
friends what pages to crawl.
When they work, we love them. When they don’t, well, just thinking
about all that lost traffic makes us shake our fists and want to smash our
keyboards.
My WordPress Sitemap isn’t working, what do I do?
So you’re running a WordPress site and you got a faulty sitemap
that’s not working?
There are a lot of different reasons why a sitemap might not
function correctly in WordPress.
Some are technical, such as issues with an integrated WordPress
ache plugin like WP Super Cache or developer code that went a little awry in
its implementation.
Others could be much more mundane, such as having an out of date
plugin generating your sitemap, or even something as simple as the box for
sitemaps being unchecked by accident.
However, if you’re running a WordPress site and having issues with
the sitemap that’s being generated, I’m willing to bet that it’s a plugin
conflict issue.
I’ve had tons of issues with sitemaps over the years, and from my
own experience (not to mention what I’ve read from browsing around the net),
I’m gonna say this is one of the top culprits for faulty sitemaps.
What plugins are causing my sitemap to malfunction?
From my experience, the two main plugins that typically lead to a broken sitemap are Yoast SEO (or other comprehensive SEO plugin) and Google XML Sitemap.
Now don’t get me wrong. Both of these are great plugins. Yoast is the
most popular WordPress SEO plugin for a reason, and Google XML Sitemaps does a
great job at, well, making sitemaps.
The issue is when you have both of them installed and activated at
the same time. The reason for this is because Yoast has a built-in sitemap
feature.
If you try to activate two different sitemap plugins, your site
simply won’t know what to do with itself.
What seems to happen is that one sitemap becomes static, frozen,
while each time you try to update it causes a duplicate sitemap or backup to be
created in your root directory.
The problem here is that the one frozen in time, never updating or
completing itself, is the one bots will crawl and not the other file.
Fixing this is fairly simple, if not exactly straightforward.
Just going into your WordPress backend and disabling one of the
two conflicting sitemaps won’t solve the issue. Neither will deactivating one
of your plugins.
You’ll notice if you have Yoast installed and Google XML Sitemaps
too, and you disable the latter, the conflict will persist in your sitemap
file.
The only solution as far as I know is to delete one of the plugins. Not disable, actual DELETE.
In my case, when this happened to me, Google XML Sitemaps and then installed Yoast and didn’t even notice the issue for months. It was only when I replaced Yoast with the SEO Framework did I realize how bugged my sitemap was.
So if you’re in the same situation try:
Double check to see if you have two plugins that both generate XML sitemaps.
Disable / un-check all your sitemap creation tools.
Delete one of the plugins. If you’re running Yoast, I would recommend deleted Google XML Sitemaps simply because it affects less of your posts.
Reactive one sitemap tool.
Refresh your page and maybe even clear your browser’s cache just to be sure.
Verify that your sitemap is now correct and voila!
An optional step, in case your issue lasted for an extended period of time, is to re-submit your sitemap.xml file to your Google Search Console. That way Google will be able to discover all the “lost” pages that might not have been getting crawled or indexed correctly.
Of course, if you’re not sure where to look for your Yoast sitemap in the first place, try this:
Open WordPress and find Yoast:
Next, go to features:
Third, scroll down and see if Sitemaps is activated.
Hope this helps. If it does (or doesn’t), leave a comment below and let others know.
It’s almost May the 4th – the official day celebrating
George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise – and it looks like Google added a couple of
Easter Eggs this year.
I happened to be doing some work on a client side when I noticed this little guy up here in the top right of the header.
At first I thought it was some some-sort of DJ. I don’t know
why. Maybe it looked like a head wearing headphones?
Either way it’s C3PO and you can go right up there and give
him a click. When you do, you’ll get a little title crawl asking if you want to
activate the Easter Eggs.
Once you do, not a lot is different around the console, but
there’s a couple of nice touches and one that scared the hell out of me.
Head down to your Coverage and…
This little ditty with the lightsabers honestly spooked the
bejesus out of me.
I was wearing headphones with the volume turned high, with my music turned low. Needless to say, it sounded like someone was drawing a lightsaber right next to me.
Depending on what you have selected, it will change colour from red, to orange to green and even a really odd-looking grey one.
Fortunately, the others are less intense and kinda fun.
When you go to examine errors, warnings or other indexation issues, you get greeted by these little guys.
