RSS feed issue
-
My Wordpress blog RSS feed is not working correctly and I can't figure why. This is the error I am getting in my sidebar where the RSS feed used to work properly. My Blog is http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/
RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 274, column 32
Any insight would be appreciated greatly!
Rob
-
Ok - wasn't willing to let this go until I could definitively track down the issue. I've never come across this before.
Rob, you've somehow managed to get a Unicode Escape character entered at the beginning of one of your paragraphs in your "Photography Series Part 1 Picking your Camera" post. This character is invisible to the reader, but because it's considered an invalid XML character, your RSS feed (which is just a specifically formatted XML file) is erroring out, as you noted.
To fix this, you're going to have to go back into your WordPress dashboard to edit that post.
Scroll to the second paragraph in the Smart Phone section that begins "You can buy a waterproof housing..."
Place your cursor at the beginning of the word "buy" and then use your backspace key to delete all the way back to the word "plenty" in the paragraph before.
- Then hit the Enter key to create the new paragraph, and retype the words you've deleted in that "You can buy..." sentence.
- Then retype the words into the end of the previous sentence.
- Then, click Update to save the new version of the post.
Believe it or not, that should fix the RSS feed validation problem.
Now, the next issue will be that many places where the RSS is used will cache the feed (i.e. store a copy of it) The only way to bust/refresh that cache will be to publish another post, so the cached version gets updated to show the new post and the fix to the old post.
If you are adding the RSS feed somewhere it hasn't been used before (e.g. to a newly created sidebar widget) it should be pulling the corrected version of the feed and work as expected.
Hope all that makes sense - if not, just holler. Sorry for all the previous confusion as I tried to work out what was actually happening.
Paul
[Ignore the original suggestion below - the fix required more research]
Rob, on your blog post titled Photography Series Part 1, Picking the Right Camera, the first subhead is "Which Camera is Right for you? Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo..."
Try removing the extra space after the question mark and before the words Sea Dwellers.
[EDITED TO ADD: Also remove the exclamation mark from the alt tag (alt="Dive and shoot!") for the associated photo.]
Then you'll have to clear the site's cache if it has one to clear any RSS cache.
Lemme know how you get on.
Paul
-
Thank you Dan for the response....
This is the error message I am getting when drag my rss widget to my sidebar...
RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 274, column 32
Here is my blog address..
http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/I'm entering my blog address in the widget as
http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/feed/Any help is greatly appreciated. Does your company offer one-time onpage seo service by any chance?
Rob
Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo -
Hi Rob
I don't currently see the error on that page, and do not see an RSS feed linked in your source code - did something change or can you provide more info? The URL to your RSS feed if possible?
Thanks!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content : domain alias issue
Hello there ! Let's say my client has 2 webshops (that exists since long time, so many backlinks & good authority on both) : individuals.nl : for individuals (has 200 backlinks, let's say) pros.nl : exact same products, exact same content, but with a different branding intended to professionnals (has 100 backlinks, let's say) So, both websites are 99% identical and it has to remain like that !!! Obviously, this creates duplicate content issues. Goal : I want "individuals.nl" to get all ranking value (while "pros.nl" should remain accessible through direct access & appear on it's own brand queries). Solution ? Implement canonical tags on "pros**.nl**" that goes to "individuals.nl". That way, "individuals.nl" will get all ranking value, while "pros.nl" will still be reachable through direct access. However, "individuals.nl" will then replace "pros.nl" from SERP in the long-term. The only thing I want is to keep "pros.nl" visible for its own brand queries -> it won't be possible through organic search result, so, I'm just gonna buy those "pros" queries through paid search ! Put links on all pages of pros.nl to individuals.nl (but not the other way around), so that "pros.nl" will pass some ranking value to "individuals.nl" (but only a small part of the ranking value -> ideally, I would like to pass all link value to this domain). Could someone advise me ??? (I know it sound a bit complicated... but I don't have much choice ^^)
Technical SEO | | Netsociety0 -
RSS Feed and WebTraffic
I am a weebly user and have a site (crmi-online.com) which has an RSS Feed of my current blog entries on my home page. I am struggling with the following issues... Duplicate Content - Moz shows duplicate content for my blog articles. Which are also housed here (http://www.crmi-online.com/news-and-press-releases). Could having the feed on my site be causing this issue? Traffic- My Weebly stats show that the RSS Feed is my 2nd highest ranking page at 713 views per this month. However when I compare it to the data in Moz my news feeds or the actual blog page are not one of my top ranking pages. Can someone help to explain the difference? Also, it appears that my site gets a lot of spam traffic and I wonder if removing the feed would help and give more accurate numbers. Is it necessary? - Is it necessary to have both the feed and the blog page? I want to move to one of the new weebly responsive themes after having trouble with a current custom/non-supported template. If I do that the feed will have to go since it jumbles the content in mobile view. I am not sure of the need except for the aesthetics on the home page since I dont see any correlation to traffic to the actual article/blog itself. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
Http v https Duplicate Issues
Hello, I noticed earlier an issue on my site. http://mysite.com and https://mysite.com both had canonical links pointing to themselves so in effect creating duplicate content. I have now taken steps to ensure the https version has a canonical that points to the http version but I was wondering what other steps would people recommend? Is it safe to NOINDEX the https pages? Or block them via robots.txt or both? We are not quite ready to go fully HTTPS with our site yet (I know Google now prefers this) Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | niallfred0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
My issue with duplicate content is this. There are two versions of my website showing up http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ What are the best practices for fixing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
Blog RSS behind https
Hi, I'm finding our blog's RSS feed won't be recognized by various websites. The feed is on a https url. Is this the most likely problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Duplicate Title Tag issue due to Shopify CMS
Hi guys, I'm a novice really when it comes to SEO, yet have taken it in house for the next year or so, firstly because I have had my fingers burnt twice...and secondly, to allow me to recoup some of the loss from my prior campaigns. One thing I have noticed on my site (which uses a Shopify E-commerce CMS), is that Shopify duplicates a url for each my products. An example of this is http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/collections/designer-radiators-heating/products/reina-aliano
Technical SEO | | philscott2006
http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/products/reina-aliano Both products provide exactly the same information, yet appear in different ways subject to how the customer finds them. I contacted Shopify to find a fix to this issue when I noticed a high amount of Duplicate Title Tags in my SEO crawl. Their response was as follows. Using a rel canonical link will help prevent duplicate content issues with search engines. All you need to do is add this line of code: **<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />** ** before the tag in the theme.liquid file. It’s that simple :)** The theme liquid file basically generates the outer template for the whole site, and is only compromised when over-ruled. This all seems a little too easy for me, so I am hoping whether someone can elaborate as to whether this will work or not, as I'm not entirely sold on their response. I was always under the impression with canonical tags, that they should be added to the header section of the duplicate page in question, which refers back to the original page. The code I have been told to add above implies that the canonical tag would be added to every page in my site so the Google robot would have a hard time in finding anything at all of relevance Thanks in advance for any assistance with this. Kind Regards Phil Scott Vida Homes0 -
Does having a page (or site) available on HTTP and HTTPS cause duplication issues?
Say I've got a site that can be accessed using either protocal (i.e. HTTP and HTTPS), but most (if not all of the links) are pointing to the HTTP versions. Will it cause a problem if I start link building to HTTPS versions? In other words does google see http://mysite.com as the same page as https://mysite.com? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Caninical issue
Hello all, I have a problem related to "canonical issues" that I would like to get your view on: The issue: Our site: http://www.texaspoker.dk/ has a "canonical issue" with the home page. We added a redirect to www.texaspoker.dk, but this hasn't solved our problem. In the latest "too many on page links" analysis made with SEOmoz' exelent SEO tool, we get the following error: http://www.texaspoker.dk(101 on page links) http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 (on page links) So, made simple, the analysis tells us that both http://www.texaspoker.dk and http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 has too many on page links. How do I eliminate / remove the unwanted http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 and how did it, in the first place, get there? Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | MPO0