Site Map Killed My Site?

I am a Newbie, so this might not be relevant.

Last weekend I added Google site map and robot.txt to my site. http://napoleon.cc and last night I checked my search on Yahoo and I had disappeared from ranking. I had been number 1 for "Barrie Home Inspector" search and now I am not even in the top ten pages.

Nothing else changed on site, that I am aware of.

Any thoughts on why this would happen Should I remove site map?

Any help would be appreciated

Fix

 

Well, this usually happens with yahoo rankings..
i would suggest not to delete google sitemap.. in between you can add Yahoo site map https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
as well i would suggest you to add a static site map on your site...
would u say how long have you been on Yahoo listing?? is it just u came on top on yahoo and you disappeared or you were on yahoo listing since long??

thanx

 

are you using a CMS?

 

There are sitemap services that will cover Yahoo, Google, HTML, and more. I sincerely doubt that Yahoo dropped you because of the Google sitemap as I've seen literally hundreds of websites submit to Google and Yahoo without an issue.

Sometimes search engines shift their ranks and this may be a temporary dip for you.

The addition of the robots.txt may have had an influence also. I know that MSN will stop visiting you for a few days after they sense a new robots.txt being uploaded to your site. unless you already removed your robots.txt, it looks like it may be in the wrong place on your server.

 

I had a site with an improperly formed sitemap, that caused my rankings to drop

 

Depending on which sitemap was malformed, I could see that particular engine lowering rank, perhaps... but I can't see Yahoo hurting a site for the Google map.

 

what i think it's not coz of google sitemap, might be some updates have taken place in yahoo

 

Hi, just reading through this post - not all of my pages are on Yahoo.
If I submit a sitemap using https://login.yahoo.com/config/login...m/free/request
does that mean that all my pages will then be indexed?

Thanks, Teeny

 

They will know about your pages and they are able to look at them. Indexing is between your site and the search engines and has little to do with your sitemap (of course, your sitemap notifies them so that they can get to your pages and decide to index or not faster than without a sitemap).

AutoMapIt will notify Google and Yahoo for you if you use the automatic upload feature for your sitemaps.

 

What does it mean when you say "improperly formed sitemap"? what is an "improper sitemap" for you?

 

It means that your sitemap is not as per google guidelines.

 

I've used Google sitemaps on very large sites with some good success. It's a pain to get the sitemap right unless you do it yourself or use a reliable tool. I like the tool from site-scan.com, but you you tweak it before submitting it to Google.

 

One thing I've also found is that malformed dates can cause the entire record in a sitemap to be ignored. Also, if you fail to include a directory that a particular page is in, I've had that page disappear entirely from the results and from the index. Moral of the story is to read through the sitemap documentation scrupulously and do precisely what they say.