I solved my problem with Google Sitemaps. It wasn’t the XML file itself, but the gzip compression tool that I was using to compress the file. I uploaded the file unzipped and let Google know the new file name and it downloaded just fine. Although Google suggests that you compress the XML files, if you dig deep you’ll find that it’s only required for files of 10 megabytes or more.
I should clarify exactly where the value of Google Sitemaps lies. If you manage a site with many dynamic URLs or URLs that may be hidden from the crawlers (don’t have direct text links into those pages), then it may be impossible for Google to find and crawl those pages on its own. Sitemaps gives you the opportunity to “tell” Google where those pages are. There is (still) no guarantee that Google will crawl and index the pages that you include in the Sitemap, but it allows you to make sure that Google is aware of them. Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, jokingly described the product as free paid inclusion at the WebMasterWorld Conference in New Orleans. While that’s yet to be seen, it appears that submitting pages not being seen by Google otherwise shouldn’t hurt anything.
The tool that I used to create my first Sitemap is a free Windows tool that seems to work fairly well and is great for us GUI junkies. I did run into a few bugs, like the built in gzip utility, but it seems to create the XML file with all of Google’s required parameters just fine. Here is a link:
