Re: Can't find reason for Invalid Date Error

Helloc bcline,
I am not sure what the correct answer to this is.
Maybe it is something to do with time zones, etc.
Some URLs in your sitemap have
<lastmod>2005-11-30</lastmod>
and it might have been some time zone confusion
if you submitted your sitemap early on November 30th,
and maybe the error message you get is still the old error.
Maybe try to remove you sitemap from your
Google sitemap account and re-submit, maybe
giving the sitemap file a different name
(just a suggestion).
There have been previous postings
to this group about the value for the lastmod tag
and how to adjust for time zone.
Also, the lastmod tag is optional, if the error persists
you could try to submit your sitemap without the
lastmod tag, until you find a solution.

As far as I know Googlebot does not compare the
value in the lastmod tag to the 'last-modified'
value on your server, but it would be logical if the
value in the lastmod tag would indicate the date
when the page content was last modified.
I think in principle the values in the changefreq
and lastmod tags can be used by Googlebot
to optimize crawling,
but I have no idea about if/how this optimizing is
implemented by Google at the moment.

bcline wrote:
> Our sitemap.xml file exactly matches Google's requirements, as far as I
> can tell. I have even compared other sites' sitemap.xml files and ours
> match exactly (not to say they don't also get errors). However, I'm
> still getting an 'Invalid Date' error, and I'm at a loss...
>
> http://antigua-guide.info/sitemap.xml
>
> Does the <lastmod> date need to match the response header field
> 'Last-Modified' for that requested page?