Phantom tags giving Google Sitemaps problem

yahoo_moe

Hi, just wondering if anyone's experienced anything similar (or can just tell me what's up really) - I've searched a good bit on this but can't find anything. I've posted in Google Webmaster Help forum too but no response yet.

Basically, I tried to update my sitemap yesterday (you can see it here*) but got an XML parsing error about start tags and end tags not matching. Halfway through a URL, Google's XML reader seemed to insert a </url> tag which obviously doesn't match the opening <loc> tag that the URL sits inside. No non-standard characters in the URL, and it doesn't contain the characters </url>. There's some mention of XSL/XML but this is halfway through processing the rest of the URLs normally and, as you'll see, the style headers are just standard. Relevant part of the file, including error message, below (opening the XML file in Firefox gives something similar):

<url>
<loc>http://www.aware.ie/education/archived_lectures/bereave * NOTE:This is where the URL is broken in two for some reason *
The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

---

End tag 'url' does not match the start tag 'loc'. Error processing resource 'http://www.aware.ie/sitemap.xml'. Line 432, P...

</url>
--^
d_by_suicide/</loc> * NOTE: End of the URL I submitted in one part, along with my closing </loc> tag *
</url>
<url>

Any reason this would happen?

* It's there as a text file because of how the site is set up through the CMS but I'm obviously submitting an XML version to Google.

Evil Phil

Line 432 is missing a closing </loc> tab, search for [noparse]http://www.aware.ie/index.php/site/comments/revolution_cycle/[/noparse] and you'll find it.

I used http://www.validome.org/xml/ to validate the xml btw.

yahoo_moe

Ah, I'd assumed line 432 was the one I'd quoted with the funny URL break being inserted... obviously not.

Excellent, cheers for that (and for the Validome link, handy tool).