I tried find out how to do it by reading the documentation but I'm not able to find it.

When I go to the webmaster tools and try to submit a sitemap, on testing I get the message that my sitemap doesn't contain url's

When I go directly to it I do see them http://albirms.com/index.php?option=com_jmap&view=sitemap&format=images&lang=nl and also for the other languages.

How do I submit my sitemap to Google and Bing?

Also tried to use the Submit sitemap to searchengines function, also no result.

I hope someone can explain me what I'm doing wrong.

Hello,

the link for the sitemap that you reported is correct and also the sitemap is ok, just checked in the browser.
However it's the link for the image sitemap, the first operation to do would be submit the regular XML sitemap, in your case:
http://albirms.com/index.php?option=com_jmap&view=sitemap&format=xml&lang=nl

Of course if you are using Google or Bing webmasters tools it's just enough submitting this link probably you are right, only notice that using for example Google webmasters tools only the final part of the links is needed: index.php?option=com_jmap&view=sitemap&format=xml&lang=nl

If you get some weird errors such as that the sitemap doesn't contain URLs, it's likely that there is some other problems.
The first thought is about ensuring that bots are allowed to fetch the sitemap.

Greetings,

John Dagelmore

I indeed get that error Your Sitemap does not contain any URLs

But looking into the fetching and crawl stats from google there seems nothing to be wrong

The robots.txt is like this

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /backups/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/sampledata
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/

Any other idea what might be wrong?

Hello Edwin,

both for the sitemap and for the robots.txt everything seems ok and working normally.

I will have a deeper look at possible issues.

John

It seems the issue is related to Akeeba Admin tools WAF, after disabling the plugin for Admin tools I can submit the sitemaps without any problem.

Thanks John for your great support so far!

I'll log a ticket at Akeeba and will post the result here as well if they can resolve it.

Ok, it was indeed related to the Admin tool and it was a setting I had activated preventing it from being picked up by Bing and Google.

I had geological blocking activated to prevent from the numerous hacking attempts but that also excluded the Google and Bing servers, reactivated them and it is working like a charm again!