XML sitemap 404 error

[digital.search]

I get this message in google but not bing
https://digital-search.netlify.app/sitemap.xml

Google search console says:
Sitemap could not be read
General HTTP error
HTTP Error: 404

I have waited over a few weeks and also resubmitted but it keeps coming back with this message
Is google being blocked in someway?

[nathanmartin]

@digital.search This may not be your issue, but here’s a recent-ish response from Netlify on what appears to be the same topic:

Google can't fetch my sitemap

Hi @NicolasK, This is a known issue with Google Search Console. Google doesn’t provide any logs about this and for random reasons keeps saying couldn’t fetch sitemap. If you wish, you can try to contact Google about this, but as long as your sitemap is working, which I can see it is, the issue is on Google’s side. I’ve experienced this myself on few of my sites and all I could do is wait indefinitely until Google decided to check my sitemap again and saw that it was working.

[digital.search]

@nathanmartin
Thanks I have tried to raise with google and they have a related thread here :
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/66434710?hl=en&authuser=1

Is there anything I can do to check google bot is not getting challenged or redirected in some way?
I can’t see any 301 redirects or similar if I try in a browser but this would not be emulating google bot user agent
Is log information available in some way on a free account

I am a newbie at netfly and just trying a few things as a test site.
It should be set up with the defaults under a free account so I would not have done any advance config or changes.

Thanks

[hrishikesh]

@digital.search

Is there anything I can do to check google bot is not getting challenged or redirected in some way?

If by challenged, you mean blocked or presented with a Captcha, I can confirm that Netlify doesn’t apply any such kinds of blocks.

Checking our internal logs, I can see that Googlebot UA was able to receive a 200 status code for over 20 times in the past week. Now I don’t know if that was someone spoofing the UA or Google itself.

[chitgoks]

this doesnt seem to be netlify’s issue from the research that i did now. however, your link’s comment says that .htaccess should be modified. are we allowed to have .htaccess in our deploy?

even so, if we include .htaccess, it will not be included in the deploy in netlify. so there does not seem to be a way for anyone to have that file in deploys.

[nathanmartin]

@chitgoks That thread has nothing to do with Netlify, it’s a Google Search Console help thread, the person in that thread has made an assumption that the other person they’re trying to help is hosting on an Apache server, but they could be hosting with anything.

There’s no .htaccess for Netlify.