Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
All of the sudden i notice in AWstats that google has totally dropped my site.
anyways so i check out sitemaps and it has totally gone bonkers!
my sitemap is getting URL errors, say (line 40) so i go delete line 40...resubmit... line 40 again...and again...and again. *agh*
HTTP errors for some werid URLS you know those www.......com/dlreofdaflj.html ones?
I have no idea what happend, everything was going great, then all of the sudden its gone to hell and im starting from scratch :-(
update on the sitemaps LOL so i deleted everything, recreated my sitemap...validated my site, now google is giving me a 404 on my sitemap.
I can pull it up just fine in my browser - google hates me.
im going to let this go for a day and see if it straightens itself out im stumped!
on a side note, would a messed up sitemap cause google to drop my site? it seems like just when i was reading that post about google's "machine crisis" my site vanished with out a trace.
.com/bsrcjeppgxjgw.html
.com/knkrnlgre.html
.com/knkrnlgre.html
.com/qknarytbe.html
404 on all of these pages.
.com/eoifcbfxfc.html
.com/lxcunhvf.html
.com/qbstjxyvx.html
May be a google has some sort of cold (virus) or worm?
.com/mftntcnpxmagskm.html
.com/mabexlgkoprr.html
anyways so i check out sitemaps and it has totally gone bonkers! "
One of the sites I manage has the same problem. Pages are dropped out of the index and sitemaps console reports HTTP problems for URLs that are not even in the xml file.
I suspect that sitemaps is having problems and this is what caused the site to lose pages in G index. The site is 100% white hat and has been triple checked --no spam or any other reason it should get penalized.
Anyone else have sitemaps problems, then pages drop out of index?
within (2-3) days.
A side note the original poster: Many times when Google reports an error on "Line x" the line number is incorrect, but there is an error somewhere.
I found this out when I kept getting an error on "Line #" and had to go back through and find where the sitemap was referencing '/' as a URL. D'oh.
May 7th and 9th
If so is 10 considered a lot?
Don't know the answer to that one. But I do have to say that with tons of scrapers and junk sites linking in all sorts of unpredictable manners I just don't see why google would stop indexing because of this.
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.
I also seen 2 sites that a trailing slash was added to the end of the url. I htaccess this problem (pages were php) since I couldn't find the source. It wasn't in the site map nor was it anything on site.
I see many incomplete url's. Urls that are cut off. Urls that have a ... at the end. Urls that have a %3C or a %20 and other strange character encodings. We have had the site map since last ohhhhhh...June and our problems have still continued since then. We have 3 other sites all with google site maps and they also show problems. I dumped 2 sites with sitemaps. Both sites are completely unique. One is done in php the other in HTML. These are our newest sites about a year + old. All other engines have these sites flawlessly.
I wouldn't remove your sitemaps file. It worked great for me, until recently. I did take off the G. analytics code today to see what will happen. But I would not recommend deleting your sitemaps xml file.
Why not remove it?
Yes please explain that one. I am testing the removal on a couple smaller sites to see what happens. I won't remove it on the big site just in case.
Also didn't you state:
"I suspect that sitemaps is having problems and this is what caused the site to lose pages in G index. The site is 100% white hat and has been triple checked --no spam or any other reason it should get penalized."
Again why are you removing analytics?
I just got the code a couple of days ago and we have been experiencing these problems LONG before applying the simple javascript.
[edited by: arubicus at 7:49 pm (utc) on May 12, 2006]
Also, why would you remove it? It helps to get your pages indexed more quickly. And with the new "diagnose" tab in the sitemaps console, it helps you to see any problems that G. might have with your site.
Again why are you removing analytics?
we are just removing the code as a test to see if it had something to do with google trashing our sitemaps.
Um no it dosent. If that were the case my site would be fully in the index. Even at that it took a couple of months to completely crawl even our new sites - heck msn and yahoo were faster at picking them up WITHOUT a site map.
The error reporting is nice but in the last year of having it on All I see is 404 errors from bum url's and that is it. NOTHING ELSE. I can easily hit my error log to see this at any point in time.
I will leave my analytics on for an alternate test. I haven't seen those types of errors you stated and since I just added analytics we will see if they show up in the next couple of days.
You are right. I meant Sitemaps *used* to help you get your pages indexed more quickly. Since the last month or so, nothing seems to help.
