Three pages dropped from Google index on 30/10/2015

[vanilla38]

Hello, I'm posting today to share my problem with you, I looked a little around and maybe someone here have experienced a similar issue:
I'm the owner of <a small website> and on 30/10/2015, 3 of my 9 indexed pages disappeared from Google causing a 20% traffic loss and it's still unresolved.
After reviewing WMT I saw that there was no error messages except this "3 Hreflang Tags with Errors" -> "'fr' - no return tags (sitemaps)" and "'it' - no return tags (sitemaps)".

To put it in a nutshell, Google tell me that there is a problem on my sitemap language configuration but my sitemap did not changed for a year, I followed the Google guidelines to create it, here's a link to it: <a website>/sitemap.xml

Really strange no ? Thank you for reading. Peace.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:54 am (utc) on Nov 13, 2015]
[edit reason] No identifying details please [/edit]

[vanilla38]

Message have been edited and links deleted, is there any way I have to share my sitemap here? Website name is <snip>

---

Mods note: I have edited the original message to remove website name. Please no URLs nor website names, as per Forum Charter, we do not allow public site reviews.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:06 pm (utc) on Nov 13, 2015]

[tangor]

This is a true 9 page website? Why have a sitemap?

Delete (or remove from index) the sitemap and see what happens.

[vanilla38]

I made a sitemap to follow the gwy best practice and the website will be translated in alot of languages this year so it must not be deleted, how can I get help from community if I cant share my sitemap ? :/

[lucy24]

I made a sitemap to follow the gwy best practice

Shocking but true: there are times when you can safely ignore google's advice even when dealing with google properties. The sole purpose of a sitemap is to ensure that they find pages that might otherwise be overlooked. But 99% of the time, if a human can find a page, so can the search engine.

When gwt/gsc refers to "sitemap" it often just means that your sitemap is how they first found out about the page. It doesn't necessarily mean that the sitemap itself has anything wrong with it.

Instead of naming the site, here's what would be useful to people here: Show the complete set of alternate/hreflang links for one of those offending pages. If the link includes your sitename, replace with "example.tld" (it can be example.fr, example.it and so on if that's what you have). The section that looks like this:

<link rel = "alternate" hreflang = "en" href = "/fonts/pagename.html">
<link rel = "alternate" hreflang = "it" href = "/fonts/pagename_it.html">

[vanilla38]

okay thanks alot, and thanks for advices regarding gwt suggestions, here's my sitemap:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/addons.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.90</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it/addons.html" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/faq.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.80</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/faq.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/faq.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/questions-frequentes.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it/domande-frequenti.html" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/fr</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/fr/addons.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.90</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it/addons.html" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/fr/questions-frequentes.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.80</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/faq.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/faq.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/questions-frequentes.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it/domande-frequenti.html" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/it</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/it/addons.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.90</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/addons.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it/addons.html" />
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/it/domande-frequenti.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.80</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/faq.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/faq.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.example.com/fr/questions-frequentes.html" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="http://www.example.com/it/domande-frequenti.html" />
</url>
</urlset>

[vanilla38]

Is anyone seeing something strange ?