Two or three years ago, I registered the emn178.cc domain and tried to move my blog to it. At the time, I ran into an issue with submitting the sitemap to Google Search Console: its status remained stuck at “Couldn’t fetch”.

Couldn't fetch

I tried many different solutions, but nothing worked. Even pages that I manually submitted to Google would gradually disappear from the index, and eventually the site became impossible to find through Google Search.

Later, I tried using GitHub Pages and submitted the site under emn178.github.io/blog, but I got exactly the same result: the sitemap status remained stuck at “Couldn’t fetch”. Eventually, I gave up.

Two or three years later, I came across someone online who had experienced the exact same problem. They were also using a .cc domain, and their sitemap could never be fetched either. However, when they switched to a different domain, everything worked normally.

So I decided to run some tests myself. I deployed the site using a Cloudflare Worker and tried submitting the sitemap with a .dev domain and another .io domain I owned. Both were successfully processed almost immediately.

I also tested some of my other domains. With a .xyz domain, I got the same result as with .cc: the sitemap remained stuck at “Couldn’t fetch”.

Finally, I registered a .com domain, and the sitemap submission succeeded almost instantly.

After being stuck with this problem for years, it seems that Google may be silently blocking or treating certain domain extensions differently. However, there are clearly additional rules involved, because GitHub Pages uses an .io domain and still didn’t work in my earlier test.

Summary of my test results

Successful

  • .com
  • .dev
  • .io

Failed

  • .cc
  • .xyz
  • GitHub Pages

Just sharing my experience in case anyone else is running into a similar problem.