Added my site to google Sitemap and traffic suddenly went down !!

So, does anyone care to explain how telling Google all your web pages and when you last updated them could cause them to tank your rankings? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It would be nothing more than a coincidense. I've submitted sitemaps for a dozen sites and always had more pages indexed and thus more traffic. The pages I already had indexed weren't affected in any way from the sitemaps.

Tell you what though, go and submit a dozen of your websites all under the same account - then G will know what sites belong to you . If your doing a bunch of cross site linking then that may be devalued and cost you rankings. If your playing like a good webmaster then you have nothing to worry about. Either that, or use different email addresses and make separate accounts for each of your sitemaps.

 

mdvaldosta - here's the deal:
this is just an example, but you'll see what I mean --
Assume you have a top site, it's fully indexed - all your URLs are in lower case (just an example ).
You now submit a Google Sitemaps file with all the URLs in CamelCase (eg http://site.com/ThisPage.html vs http://site.com/thispage.html). Technically those are two unique URLs, but Windows servers (just for this example) will ignore the case and serve the same content for both URLs.

Now you've got a problem: Your links are pointing to the lowercase URLs, your Sitemap is pointing to the CamelCase URLs. When Google reads the CamelCase URLs it will notice that they conflict with the linked URLs and will drop the linked ones (because YOU must surely know better if you the webmaster submitted it that way). That's hit #1.

Now, since Google Sitemaps are generally processed twice daily, you have 12 hours for Google to find more of your lowercase links. It'll find some, don't worry, if only from your own site . Of course they're the same content as the CamelCase ones. Hit #2.

Now the 12 hours are over, go back to the first step ... can you see where this is headed? back and forth, over and over again. Do you think that'll do your rankings any good? This game does NOT happen to all sites with Sitemaps (even with different URLs), but many sites have potential for it - and not only because of Sitemaps (say someone places a "bad" link to your site on several high-value pages...).

So how can you avoid that? Make sure your URLs are the same everywhere! Sitemaps and everywhere else should be using the same URLs, in the same format. Your website should be 301-redirecting any "bad" URLs to the correct ones. Any URLs that give the same content as others should be marked with the appropriate robots-meta-tag. You know, this is the stuff you should have been doing anyway

Yes, Windows-Servers are a pain in the b### for the case issues, but you can still work with that and fix it.

This is not a Google Sitemaps issue but imho a webmaster issue. Also keep in mind that you'll have lots of other influences on your sites at any given time. Just because your tanking happened to coincide with your Sitemaps-use does not mean Sitemaps is at fault. By pushing the blame into Sitemaps you might be ignoring the real issues that you could be running into over and over again! I've personally looked into over 100 sites supposedly "punished" by Google Sitemaps and almost every time (with very few exceptions) the reasons for the tanking where elsewhere.

But if you want to put the blame on Google Sitemaps and possibly ignore "reality", be my guest

 

Think about it you are in google you are ranking high for a keyword.

You submit a sitemap that has links that are already in google for high ranking words, it glitches unindexes your link and puts it back without being able to tell and you then lose your position. Google isn't perfect it could happen.

 

Yeah, of course. But it could also happen when you update your content, add a new page, add a new link, someone searches during a full moon, Matt Cutts slips on a banana peel, Sergy buys a new jet, etc. etc.

"COULD"

IF your site is not safely indexable then you're playing with the fire anyway. If your site needs to be reindexed after submitting a sitemap file then it would be just a matter of time until Google reindexes your site anyway.

 

One thing I've noticed, is that the sitemaps have helped me keep my urls and links in order. You check 100 times and you'll miss an uppercase or a type that you may have missed without the sitemap.

Also handy if you take on a renovation. Have three of them going now and the sitemap helps to point out dead links. Sure Analytics and logs would have caught them but sitemaps makes them pretty easy to spot.

All in all I think the biggest thing is that sitemaps enforce that your web site is following the standards that Google wants. Heck we all know that this will help them with there indexing and such.

 

Just submitted a site map and we are now in position #2 from #87 for one keyword phrase. Sorry this thread is worthless unless someone can show stats to back up the claim that g sitemaps are a P.I.T.A.

 

Not sure why sitemaps is causing problems with some of the posters. We love it because it has helped to index large redone shopping sites with many items. In cases where a deep crawl is needed to reindex a complete redone site with new URLs, an XML sitemap has done the trick. Static sites with a well made HTML site map (Not a Google Sitemap) should not be concerned. As someone said, Google Sitemaps offers some interesting stats, which is good to have.