Losing rankings after submitting sitemap?

[whateverandeveramen]

Has anyone heard about this? I read over at the dp forums about people losing lots of indexed pages and positions after submitting a sitemap for year+ old sites, one guy did a test with 5 of his sites and it happened to all of them.

Anyone heard about this sort of thing or is it nonsense?

[tedster]

There have been occasional reports like this, both here and on other forums. But the point most people miss is that just because something happens AFTER something else does not mean it happened BECAUSE of the earlier action. That's a logical fallacy known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc", or "after this, therefore because of this."

I guess it's possible that a sitemap could illumnate some error or other in the website that wasn't previously seen by Google. But in that case, the site's flaw would be the real cause of lost rankings, and not the sitemap. If submitting a sitemap to Google actually caused lost rankings on a regular basis, then we'd be hearing a lot of complaint - and we aren't.

Occasional errors do happen at Google, so I can't categorically promise that that this report is complete nonsense. But I'm pretty sure we're really talking about a faulty analysis.

[jd01]

...one guy did a test with 5 of his sites and it happened to all of them.

If the 5 sites were in the same niche, interlinked, or in some way considered 'near duplicate', etc. I can see how submitting site maps for all of them from the same account could have been detrimental, because it could have provided enough information about 'ownership' to cause the sites to be considered spam.

Not sure if the above was the case, and am not speaking to the drop in rankings of a single site, but for multiple sites it seems like a grouping of site maps within a single account could trigger a 'spam' related filter, which would have otherwise been undetected, unless the sites were completely unrelated.

Justin

[webwannabee]

At SES NYC, some of the google people said site maps were a good thing to submit because it aids the search/algo process. While I don't doubt you had a bad experience after submitting them, I am having a hard time getting my arms around google deliberately making nefarious suggestions.

Has there been any other recent modifications to your site?

respectfully,

[netchicken1]

Having been involved in this debate for a number of years, it seems that the underlying factor is not "to sitemap or not to sitemap" its where you generate these sitemaps

I have a standalone program that I purchased that makes sitemaps, its fantastic, and has certinaly aided my site over the years.

However some people have been using online sitemap generators.

These programs may not only generate te sitemap, but according to others actually harvest the urls and content for their own usage.

Google, who have instuted the sitemap senarios, developed the code (I suppose) and created the webmaster setup to administer sitemaps are hardly going to spend all that time, energy and money, developing that makes the webmasters sites WORSE.

Thats just illogical.

Therefore look outside of the google structure to see what the problem is, I can't believe that google would create and run a program that does excatly the opposite of what it is designed to, not after so many years of use.

[Tonearm]

Can a sitemap increase rankings if Googlebot already seems to be crawling the site just fine?