Google Search Console - Sitemap Indexing Error!

Today, I have seen a very weird error while using Google Search Console to index my sitemap. After I submit my sitemap https://hexalink.xyz/sitemap.xml. it always shows error: Couldn't fetch. I think you can try it yourself with my sitemap.

This error is super tricky and it took me a whole night to debug. At first, let look at our usecase.

There are two identical file named: sitemap.xml and sitemap1.xml.

Check 1: Sitemap file are all the same with extract contents.

• Same ownership (jenkins:jenkins)
• Same content (md5sum: 859ffa73b9eaf8dcaef920ffafbc1a45)

Check 2: wget & md5sum

• Same content (md5sum: 859ffa73b9eaf8dcaef920ffafbc1a45)

Check 3: Testing with Google Search Console to read my sitemap

It’s getting interesting here!
When google try to fetch my sitemap.xml , it shows an error Couldn't fetch. However, it works for sitemap1.xml.
I believe it’s because of caching issue. Old data exists somewhere on the google data center. I would wait hours for this but to debug a sitemap generator, it’s crazy. I better create a new file sitemap-n.xml to debug.

Right now, there is no solution for me but a work-around using sitemap1.xml, or any sitemap-n.xml.

By the way, this is my jekyll sitemap.xml. You can found it https://github.com/nguyenvinhlinh/nguyenvinhlinh.github.io/blob/master/sitemap.xml.

---
layout: null
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
    xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
{% for post in site.posts %}
{%   if post.update == nil or post.update == ""  %}
{%     assign mod_date = post.date %}
{%   else %}
{%     assign mod_date = post.update %}
{%   endif %}
<url>
  <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}</loc>
  <lastmod>{{ mod_date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
</url>
{% endfor %}
</urlset>