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Thanks, both. We'll explore a better solution with Demandware.

Extra thought: We're wondering if it's a bigger issue involving the redirect mechanic? Currently, users from a specific country are automatically redirected to their respective locale (e.g. US users trying to access Australian URLs are redirected to /en/us/). Is there something in this where Googlebots aren't able to access AU, NZ and UK subdirectories and sitemap files because they're coming from North America?

Hi Moz folks,

We have launched an international site that uses subdirectories for regions and have had trouble getting pages outside of USA and Canada indexed.

Google Search Console accounts have finally been verified, so we can submit the correct regional sitemap to the relevant search console account.

However, when submitting non-USA and CA sitemap files (e.g. AU, NZ, UK), we are receiving a submission error that states, "Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page," despite them being .xml files, e.g. http://www.t2tea.com/en/au/sitemap1_en_AU.xml.

Queries on this suggest it's a W3 Cache plugin problem, but we aren't using Wordpress; the site is running on Demandware.

Can anyone guide us on why Google Search Console is rejecting these sitemap files? Page indexation is a real issue.

Many thanks in advance!

Hi folks!

We had a question come in from a client who needs assistance with their robots.txt file.

Metadata for their homepage and select other pages isn't appearing in SERPs. Instead they get the usual message "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more".

At first glance, we're not seeing the homepage or these other pages as being blocked by their robots.txt file: http://www.t2tea.com/robots.txt.

Does anyone see what we can't? Any thoughts are massively appreciated!

P.S. They used wildcards to ensure the rules were applied for all locale subdirectories, e.g. /en/au/, /en/us/, etc.