Submit to Sitemaps - and Go Supplemental

added site to sitemaps and within a few days supplemental

[tiori]

One of my websites had been doing just fine for about 4 years. Well indexed by Google; crawled regularly; received reasonable traffic from Google; did not show any supplementals. No www non www problems. All 133 pages of my small site were indexed properly.
Had survived all of the updates to algo over the years. Refreshes and whatever else you want to call them. Everything was fine.

About two weeks ago I decided to submit a sitemap to Google. (What a fool I am) Within days the entire site went supplemental. Every page!

Now no traffic from Google.

So now try and convince me sitemaps didn't have anything to do with it!

[pechspilz]

> The only result seen was that ALL of the forum posts went supplemental
> as the well should have. His core content pages still rank very high
> ... normally next to mine on the first page. in this case at least,
>"supplemental" content is recognized as such. is this a problem?

Wow, we were experiencing exactly the same soon after submitting our sitemap back in January! Almost all forum posts supplemental, every other bit doing quite well.

[Scurramunga]

Has google ever stated ANY benefit of using sitemaps? I'm pulling the plug..

How will pulling the plug get us out of such a mess? Has anyone that has tried pulling the plug and experienced any improvement?

[edited by: Scurramunga at 10:39 am (utc) on Aug. 5, 2006]

[jrs_66]

--- How will pulling the plug get us out of such a mess? Has anyone that has tried pulling the plug and experienced any improvement?

Has anyone experienced any improvement by using sitemaps? Has anyone seen any downside by removing the sitemaps? I think the answer to both questions is no.

[RobinK]

Conrad posted a bit earlier in this thread "I deleted the site map from the site and the console and a week latter everything was back to normal. Your mileage may very."

[dmje]

I had improvement after removing the sitemap xml file, even though looking at the sitemap console google seems to think it is still there.

I had pages come out of supp hell, more pages going into the main index, new pages getting crawled and indexed within just a few days, pages moving up in the serps, traffic went way up, refferals from google more than doubled etc. cant say all this is directly from sitemap removal, just that it all happened after the removal.

Believe me I will never use it again.

[snooprock]

I was racking my brain with one of my sites that went from having 50 pages indexed down to 6. After 2 months trying to get to the bottom of it, I deleted my google site map to that site only and poof, all my pages were back in like 3 days. I have since deleted the site maps for all of my sites and will never use them again.

[europeforvisitors]

Are we supposed to believe the data Google gleans from sitemaps is *just right* while you tell us the data we receive from Google is *wonky*?

1) A list of URLs for a crawler is a whole different kettle of fish from a reporting application.

2) If the data that Google's crawler gleans with the help of a sitemap is "wonky," then shouldn't data gleaned without that list of URLs be just as wonky, if not more so?

[jrs_66]

--- 2) If the data that Google's crawler gleans with the help of a sitemap is "wonky," then shouldn't data gleaned without that list of URLs be just as wonky, if not more so?

One method seems to have created industry domination while the other seems to have created mass confusion. I'd just as soon keep the old tried and true...

[Scurramunga]

Thanks.
After reading about your experiences I am seriously also starting to consider pulling the plug on sitemaps.

Incidently, I used the "Preferred" domain option last night. I hope this doesn't end up screwing me.

[reseller]

Good evening Folks

There have been recently several Data Refreshes which have affected several fellow members sites (as reported on related threads). And your site could have been affected too by those Data Refreshes, not by the Sitemaps.

Honestly I can't see any feature on the Sitemaps which could affect your ranking or cause your site or pages to be deindexed or turned supplementals.