I was recently trying to submit a site feed, actually a site map, to Yahoo Site Explorer and kept getting a ‘Sorry, your request is invalid’ error message.

I did all the usual checks ensuring the file I had uploaded to my website was in a valid format, created a new one, uploaded it, tried it in both xml and txt formats and generally messed around for about an hour.

Extremely frustrated I was about to give up when I found the solution.

Click on My Sites at the top of the left navigation menu, then click on your website URL that should be listed in the My Site section.

Now click on the Feeds link that should have appeared in the left navigation menu and if you had the same problem as me you’ll now find that in the Feeds box that has appeared, whereas before there was just a forward slash and then the text entry box for your site map file, you’ll now see your full website address before the text entry box.

Enter the name of your site map file that you’ve uploaded to your server, click add feed and it should work.

What a bloody wind up!