pf » Loss of traffic due to Google sitemaps

Loss of traffic due to Google sitemaps

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PJ Hyett has discovered that his out of date google sitemap was the reason for his drop in traffic from google. So if you created a sitemap when they first came out and forgot about it, you either want to keep it updated (creating it dynamically would be a good way to go), or remove it from google.

I went through the whole drawn out process, added my site to their service, and completely forgot about it...
I had a feeling that this was why my site stopped appearing on Google... I promptly deleted the link to my site on Sitemaps.
Sure enough, after checking this afternoon, this site appears again on Google when you search for my name. My advice to you is not to use Sitemaps unless you stay on top of it, who knows how much search engine traffic I've lost.


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On 09/04/2007 at 9:47:59 AM MDT Kenneth Udut wrote:
1
Thanks for this bit of information!

I had a text sitemap containing most of the 30000 articles I had, and suddenly, I noticed 90% of them disappeared off of Google. I guess Google figured it was old. Wow - I'll try it and let you know what happens! Ken Udut http://free.naplesplus.us/

On 09/19/2007 at 6:41:33 AM MDT Kenneth Udut wrote:
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It worked! I took my overly large text sitemap (which I thought was SO clever, even having weights assigned to the different entries) and removed it from google sitemaps. Within a week, those sites that I had sitting on that sitemap that seemed to have disappeared from google, suddenly reappeared with a vengence!

I'm amazed!

I think it's good to put the big sitemap up on google until Google gets around to crawling them, THEN remove it. Once it's in the Google index, there's no more need for the sitemap, right?

Ken, http://free.naplesplus.us, Collier County, FL info website.




  



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