Google Error: Sitemap is HTML

Please check your sitemap URL yourself (in normal browser) on the normal location /sitemap.xml and then compare it to your site’s /?feed=sitemap … it should be the same.

You can press Ctrl+u to see the source code. It should be proper XML source. If not, then you’re not seeing the sitemap that is generated by this plugin.

Can you share a link to your site? I can take a look if you want…

It looks the same, and fine to me, but Webmaster Tools keeps giving me that error. It would be great if you’d take a look, thanks. The website is https://www.hondurasnews.com

Your https://www.hondurasnews.com/sitemap.xml redirects to https://www.hondurasnews.com/sitemap_index.xml which is Yoasts SEO plugin’s sitemap. It’s different from https://www.hondurasnews.com/?feed=sitemap … There is no point in using both plugins together. Either disable the XML Sitemap module in the SEO plugin or disable the XML Sitemap option on Settings > Reading. If you’re not using the Google News sitemap too then you might as well remove the ML Sitemap & Google News feeds plugin completely ??

Sorry, I should have been more specific. It is the news sitemap on my website that is receiving that error. https://www.hondurasnews.com/sitemap-news.xml
not the regular sitemap.xml.

I am only using the Google news sitemap feature of this plugin. I have the XML Sitemap option disabled.

Hmmm, looking at the source of I do see some lines with stuff like

<!-- google_ad_section_end --><!-- google_ad_section_start -->

I have no idea where that is coming from. Are you using a Google Ads plugin? Could you disable that for a while and test the news sitemap again?

In any case, it should in theory not cause the XML source to be seen as HTML — even W3C sais it’s valid, see https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hondurasnews.com%2Fsitemap-news.xml — but Google Webmaster Tools might think otherwise… it’s worth trying.

Otherwise, there might be some user-agent based redirection going on on your server. Try the Fetch as Googlebot tool in your GWT account. It might show some clues about what Google sees and how it may be different from what everybody else sees.

Disabling the better adsense targeting plugin seemed to work, no idea why. Thank you. I

OK, so it looks like these Google Adsense remarks in the source are confusing Google… That’s good to know.

Is that https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/better-adsense-targeting/ ? I’ll test with it to see if these tags can be removed from feeds…

Hmmm, I see no option in the plugin to disable these for feeds. You’ll have to ask the developer on https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/better-adsense-targeting to do a !is_feed() check before inserting any tags…