Well... Google Sitemaps didn't seem to work for me.

It was going pretty fast indexing a lot of pages mind you I have over 3 million of them and it only has indexed like 30,000. So I decided to do Google Sitemaps... the first day it showed 300,000 pages. Then they started dropping, and dropping and dropping all the way down to 13,000. ?!?@#? I just don't get it. And mind you the thing continues to heavily crawl my site. I even upgraded to a better server because I couldn't handle all the traffic and now what?

I'm taking it off.... I just don't feel it... May be Sitemaps are good for sites with around 10K or 20K pages... but for a site with millions it doesn't seem to work.

Well.. it's true that my site is also an affiliate and may be google doesn't like that. Would you say that is the biggest reason why it's dropping the pages?

 

I tested Google sitemaps with 20 new sites and nothing was happening, so I reverted back to the usual methods for getting them indexed.

 

just because you use google sitemaps doesnt mean that google chooses to index all your pages

 

But it was increasing my index by like 5,000/day. And crawling heavily my site before. Then I submit a sitemap, and it jumped to 300,000 pages for a day, and then all going downhill down to 13,000 within 3 days (I had like 30,000 pages indexed before that)

May be I needed to be more patient with it but I just figured if it was gonna index any of these pages it is going to crawl them anyways. I just wanted to tell it that the content is static so it won't visit it too often.

 

Well Guess What!!!!! It started going back up only few hours after I removed the sitemap.

 

That's interesting. The only ones I've seen indexed are those that were older pages done before I sitemapped (about 105 pages, vs. 450).

Wonder if I should try the same thing.

 

I don't see how a sitemap can hurt your rankings.

 

Just causing it to deindex a lot of pages that it "thinks" are irrelevant or "similar"

Oh by the way now it's adding like 2000 pages/day AFTER I deleted the sitemap... go figure...

 

I had a similar problem, google has started de-indexing my site. I guess I will remove my sitemap too

thanks

 

After reading that I'm tempted to not use one, I made one because google told me to, but if it's going to hurt something then forget it lol

 

p.s. I just made my site and I have like 10 members... if that matters

 

Your site doesn't have a lot of pages and it might actually work out well for you.

My site has been around for a long time but may be Google didn't like the jump from 300 to 3 million pages overnight even though they are legit.

I'd say give it a try. You can always remove it down the road, in general shouldn't hurt you unless it confuses the engine.

Also how many pages do you have and how many of them are actually indexed by google?

 

I'm not exactly sure how many pages there are in total, I'm using phpbb plus with various add-ons and such. I have two mods installed that have to do with seo and sitemaps, one is for using mod-rewrite (which i can't figure out how to set up and lost patience) that makes and maintains a sitemap for you. For now I just used the sitemapspal.com one and stuck that in there.

The other is a bot management program that tells me how many times various bots have seen my site and gives a percentage of what all they looked at and indexed. basically when the bot shows up it shows me the botname and user-agent and i either add it to the list or ignore (for other user-agents like me or my members). Once I add that particular bot and ip it shows when they visit and even shows them as a member in (Whos Online).

I don't know, I'm just trying to figure it all out and I started a project i called the "SEO Project" so I can keep track of what all I did and how it's going so far. Later on if any of the information is useful I'll compile it all together and let other people like me see what all i did.. might be usefull to someone...somewhere