montefin - 6:56 pm on May 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

Dating back to April 11th, Google Sitemaps's trouble with robots.txt has been implicated in the erroneous exclusion of important URLs at my site. Concurrently, our Google referral traffic declined sharply.

Dated May 1st, the Sitemaps diagnostic tool is now reporting HTTP Errors on some of our URLs where %E2%80%A6 is showing up in the middle of the URL.

%E2%80%A6 is unicode for the horizontal ellipsis, i.e. "...".

Yesterday, Google Analytics showed that Google search referral traffic plummeted even further.

I haven't yet submitted a sitemap to Google so I don't know where these "errors" are being generated. I'm hesitant to submit one until these issues are resolved.

The one thing that doesn't seem to be affected is Google Image downloading from my site. If anything that has increased. Unfortunately, we derive little or no benefit from that Google activity.