Trying to Submit a Sitemap to Bing: What Does this Error Mean?

Question

Hi,

Does Bing allow sitemaps with images?

I'm tring to submit my sitemap to Bing. But, I got this error:

We were unable to add your sitemap because: Http status code: 200 Severity: Error Line: 1292 Position: 12 Message: The 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9:loc' element is invalid - The value '' is invalid according to its datatype 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9:tLoc' - The actual length is less than the MinLength value. Severity: Error Line: 1596 Position: 6 Message: The element 'image' in namespace 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1' has invalid child element 'geo_location' in namespace 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1'. List of possible elements expected: 'license' in namespace 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1'.

What does this error mean?

My sitemap.xml is in this format. I've cut it down to a one page example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" 
        xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"&gt;

  <url> 
    <loc>http://www.mysite.com/#&lt;/loc&gt; 
    <lastmod>2010-09-23</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <image:image>
       <image:loc>http://www.mysite.com/images/theplace.jpg&lt;/image:loc&gt;
       <image:caption>This is the place</image:caption>
       <image:geo_location>Place, State</image:geo_location> 
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Thank you.

-Laxmidi

Answer 1

Hi Laxmidi,

It's Google the only search engine currently which supports Image sitemaps. The other search engines may successfully parse these sitemaps but they will likely ignore the tags related to the Image sitemap extension.

Note that in your example there's an error, and is likely that this is what causes parsing difficulties for Bing. The Image schema hub is located at http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1/

That is, you need to replace the following bit:

xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"

with

xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"