Google sitemap requirements identifying errors in my video descriptions

[jayscot]

There are a few threads about sitemaps but most are for older versions. I am using 2.8.1.
When you create a sitemap, google webmaster tools complains. (BTW, you do still need to fix the robots file path.)

The problem for me is that google complains of illegal characters in my sitemap. These are <p> and <BR> because I use them in the descriptions to force paragraph breaks to make long descriptions look better for the viewers. (I also know these same characters show up in the RSS feed pages, but I did not care as it did not actually end with an error.

The question is then, what do you do in your descriptions to force paragraphs or some kind of formatting? Is there some other way to make the descriptions look nicer, but still not break any rules of format for google sitemapping?

If there is no fix, then I have to choose to not use google sitemapping, or to fix several thousand descriptions to look like ugly blobs of text. (Hmmm?? or to not put descriptions in the sitemaps- maybe just keep the first 100 characters?)

Dave

[bplex]

Your sitemap may be just dumping the description out without any sanitation. If that is the case, you can sanitize the output to remove any HTML tags from the description in the sitemap so that it just shows plain text.

[vshare2]

Hi,

Please open a Support ticket with your site admin and FTP login details.

We will fix the sitemap errors.

Thanks,

[jayscot]

To close this thread. The problem was that the output of the description was including all the html code. Unless you are a guru with coding it is best to ask for help with a support ticket. They did a great job of modifying the several files that needed to change in order to avoid errors with Google. So the result is that any content was cleaned so there are no special characters, punctuations or capitals. For example, "Six<br>dogs, 25 caTs!<p>sleeping" becomes "sixdogs 25 catssleeping". Buy hey, Google does not complain.