Sitemap used by Google to REMOVE pages (?)

Hi everyone!
This is actually a follow up on my earlier message about some site indexing problems. I just wanted to add some details, and they (may) have to do with the Google sitemap for the site in question.
Basically the problem is: the site lost almost all of its 1,000,000+ indexed pages (there were "only" 500,000+ pages on the site at that time) and ALL those pages lost have been concentrated in one section of the site. Coincidentally, while working on the sitemap for the site, I started from that section, and that was (still is) the only part of the site included in the sitemap. The sitemap was up and running since Nov '05. The sitemap gets updated every night and Google gets pinged once a day to tell them there's been a change in the sitemap. One day in late Jan '06 the entire section of the site is gone - no cache, no PR. The rest of the site stayed, but since then none of the new pages of the site - in the troubled section and outside of it - are indexed by Google anymore.

Any insight on possible adverse effects of Google sitemaps anyone? Had anyone ever screwed things up this bad by using the sitemaps?

 

I am new here.
I just see google site map.
But any one know how it works?

 

no one reply????????????????????

 

Interesting problem. If your site was completely dropped from the index, perhaps it was because you broke one of Google's guidelines for webmasters?

Does the googlebot still visit any of the pages that are no longer indexed?

 

Cest Link www.eshop-china.com
I now change from ASP to Html in order to be quick.
Hope someone can introduce some good host for me.

 

i have seen a similar thing for our forums. the forums were having 34 K pages in Google and when i used VBSEO sitemap generator to make a sitemap, within 5 - 7 days, all pages were removed, just 300 pages now.

I removed the sitemap from my account on Google Sitemaps

 

I had been looking into this specifically, more importantly doing a little testing. Granted only one one or two pages but so far I haven't been able to prove what you've decribed, although I had the same thought a month or so ago.

I had actually posted a sitemap with a couple mistakes. The pages showed up in the error section but a specific search for those pages in Goog showed up nothing. Fixed the problem and the next day the pages had been indexed.

Now, remember I haven't been able to make this work 100% of the time. More like 85% (actually 83.78%), but the trend still breaks above the curve. This practice would seem to make sense, if Goog is asking us to help them index accurately then removing dead links would certainly be a benefit.

The above is early data, but I would say to make sure the Sitemap is accurate as the number one rule, assuming that you have one posted. I would also surmise that with large sites, multiple sitemaps may be a good idea, both for goog and the webmaster.

 

Good To Learn Something Here.

 

Good To Learn Something Here.

 

Is there a max limit to google sitemaps?

 

i've heard bad thing about sitemaps. but why should they came up with it if it wasn't meant for good?

 

I have had a sitemap submitted since the the beginning of March and google is picking up weird 404 errors (none of the errors are on the xml sitemap). None of the pages on the sitemap have been indexed yet, and I thought it was possibly because of duplicate content but maybe it is the errors?
Like most other people on this tread I have not had much luck with the google sitemaps, but none of my few indexed pages have been removed.

 

... unrelated to this thread's topic, but am I the only one wondering what on earth is with dannydear?

 

i just learn to build site and also i just trying to find good host.

 

we are using the sitemap in our sites. one strange thing we noticed is that, we had single sitemaps and then we created multiple sitemaps. Later due to difficulties in maintaining multiple sitemaps, we switched to single sitemap. also we deleted the multiple sitemaps from google sitemap account.

this is done around a month ago. but still google is looking for the deleted sitemaps.

because they are deleted, we return 404 status and to avoid that we just created a dummy sitemap without any urls.

we had good success with sitemap at the begining. after adding the sitemap with in a couple of days our entire site was indexed. but later google dropped many pages.

we are currently seeing that google indexes our pages and then drops. don;'t know what is the issue?

 

sitemaps should help pages get indexed

 

I have a new site and I think the sitemap helped

 

Hello,
Sorry I am new here and wish I could you before or others about this problem. I have posted topics about this and is part of my research, if you like more information please let me know, so I can explains the cons and pros of sitemap. I have justed a forum on these topics and would update it on daily basis, if interested you can read it and find for yourself, since it is hard for me to cover everything different places.

Thank you

 

Guys, I'm sorry I was traveling and dropped out of my own thread here. So, I'm back in business now and I'd like to post some replies to ideas/suggestions posted here:

@Ammox - The map is (was - I pulled it out until I understand what's going on) dynamically re-created every night. Then, about 30 minutes after the map is re-done I ping Google to let them know there are changes. I have double-checked random URLs from the map and they are all correct.

I was thinking along the lines of making a logical, not technical mistake in using the map: I still don't understand the role of the weight factor that you have to give all the pages. Again, in my case I only completed partial sitemap. So, there are always pages on the site that were left outside the map, and I never knew what weight to use. Supposedly, if you use more than 0.5 they will become more important than average. I wanted those mapped pages to get picked up first, so I gave them 0.75. Does anyone think putting this much weight on those mapped pages was a mistake? Again, technically the maps validate as XML (though gzipped due to size) and all the URLs are correct.

Any more ideas, folks?

 

I don't think the weight means anything as yet, but I could be wrong with the last update.

I currently have a site that has 8 404 links identified as in sitemap.

1. Links aren't 404, even when you click on them from the list the page comes up.

2. I haven't pinged goog for this sitemap in 3 weeks. So I resubmitted last night and now it's down to 5 pages.

It's starting to look like just a timing issue.