Sitemap.aspx is not longer accepted by Google Search Console

[wbonekamp]

Open Google Search console and add new sitemap: domain.com/sitemap.aspx
Error: can't fetch (type unknown)

url sitemap.aspx is available in browser ans is a valid xml format
Tested the url in several sitemap validators and all pass

When you save the sitemap.aspx in sitemap.xml the sitemap is accepted and show the indexed pages

Steps to reproduce

List the steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open Google Search console
2. Add sitemap
3. domain.com/sitemap.aspx
4. Save

Error log

can't fetch (unknown type)

Affected version

DNN 9.2.2
DNN 9.3.2

[thabaum]

can this be saved as an XML instead of aspx I believe that is the issue here as it has been a long time problem for versions ever since it was created in DNN as far back as I can remember. This would be a good one to resolve.

The format inside the file I believe is just like an XML file. I have put a few issues in as well in the past about this.

[valadas]

Hmm, I never had an issue submitting sitemap.aspx not sure if google changed something recently I don't have any new site right now to submit but all my existing sites are using sitemap.aspx and get refreshed correctly.

[thabaum]

I believe it works with the google webmaster and bing webmaster sites. but never worked for me using DNN

[wbonekamp]

Try a new DNN9 website and add your sitemap.aspx in Google Search Console. You wil see it's not accepted.

And yes sitemaps that were added in the past keep working on sitemap.aspx.
The problem only exist for new websites.

[valadas]

I was able to reproduce, looks like there was a recent change/bug with google search console, I would suggest upvoting https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/14503265?hl=en

This was discussed in #2863 and it includes a way to make it work using the .xml extension but using a url rewrite module that would create a new environment dependency on Dnn and it was agreed to not implement this in the core. In that same issue it was discussed that having dynamic sitemaps with .aspx extension respects industry standards, so ultimately this is currently a google search console bug.

Is there another way to have something similar to a url rewrite without the IIS UrlRewrite module? Any possible solution on our side?

[EPTamminga]

@thabaum The .aspx/xml change can be handled by a rule in the web.config.

Any request for the sitemap.xml will be handled by sitemap.aspx

<rewrite>
	<rules>
		<rule name="SiteMap"
		 enabled="true"
		 patternSyntax="Wildcard"
		 stopProcessing="true">
			<match url="*sitemap.xml" />
			<action type="Rewrite"
			  url="{R:1}sitemap.aspx"
			  appendQueryString="true" />
		</rule>
	</rules>
</rewrite>

[valadas]

@thabaum

The format inside the file I believe is just like an XML file.

Yes not only the format but the mime-type too. I think what happens is that google now supports multiple sitemap formats and wrongly relies on the file name instead of the returned mime type to decide the type of sitemap.

[valadas]

For those who know more about it than me, could url routing (like used for service routes) be used in a similar fashion to point requests for SiteMap.xml to SiteMap.aspx transparently?

Something along the lines of:

RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.MapPageRoute(
        "sitemap",
        "sitemap.xml",
        "~/sitemap.aspx"
    );
}

[trouble2]

I know Sacha Trauwaen made the open url rewriter module which (among some other nice additions) took care of this: https://github.com/sachatrauwaen/OpenUrlRewriter

See here for all the nice additions:
SEO
clean urls (http://www.mysite.com/en/mypage/myarticle)
no duplicate content
exlude non relevant content from search engines
clean and complete sitemap
also for multi-language

Site quality
no broken links
page not found 404 and redirections 301, 302 detection

URL Rewriter
Rewriting of language part of the url (www.mysite.com/fr/...)
Rewriting the page part of the url independent of the page name
Rewriting for module parameters
Rewriting modules without pagename
Rewriting of all urls of home page to potal alias
Removing file extension

URL Redirector
Hold all the history of url’s for redirecting
No automatic url change on page name change
Making automatic redirections of the old dnn urls
Making end user custom redirections

URL Analyser
Log url for trouble shooting
URL Sitemap generator
sitemap generation
sitemap with alternate links for multilanguage
rewriting of sitemap.xml to sitemap.aspx

Meta data generator
Meta Robots replacing (for login, register, terms, privacy pages)
Exluding site from Google during development
Annotation rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

[mikesmeltzer]

@valadas I'm not sure if routing would work without trying it but this could be done using a URL Provider extension. I'm going to be doing something similar soon for a portal level robots.txt file. I'll take a look at this if this is still open when I look at the robots and see if it would work in a similar way.

[wbonekamp]

Rewrite is a workaround option but I hoped it could be fixed in DNN core.

I assume many DNN users have this problem and the sitemap functionality is quite essential to get your DNN website indexed the right way