freshpromo - 3:16 pm on May 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

His people in Google told him, he says, that they were having some issues with sites that had sitemaps in Google, that Gbot wasn't visiting new pages, and that once a sitemap had resided there for a while, Gbot really slowed down on re-crawls. Is any of this valid? germane? All hogwash?

Funny you should say that. I have a site that coincidentally disappeared from Google's index (600+ pages) at the same time I submitted to SiteMaps about a month and a half ago. Now all that's left is my home page in their index. I suppose at this point a test wouldn't do much harm, as in deleting my SiteMap and seeing if the Gbot crawls again at a faster speed.