Let me start off by saying that I missed this place. I had been a member for well over 15 years and last posted over 9 years ago. In fact, with life getting in the way and not bring very active on my soon-to-be 25 year old site, I had completely forgotten about this website until it came up in a Google search.
Anyway, so here is my issue: in the last 3 years or so, my website was suddenly not coming up ok Google. I never had this issue and in fact my website would often come up in Google searches for so many keywords related to my niche.
Anyway, today , I decided to dig deep into my ranking issues and why Google is no longer showing results from my website. For the record, it shows a few (less than 20) but my website has literally tens of thousand of pages and has been online since 1999 (2000 is when I got my current domain name) . I discovered something strange about my sitemap.xml file. Instead of having the usual website url between the <loc></loc> tags, there was another URL there from another website that I own (but is not related to the main website that has the issue). No idea how that came in there. Another related issue is that I have a second sitemap, but this one is compressed (gz) - but this one I didn’t get a chance to open and view its content (will do later)
Extra details in case it helps:
-Between 2018 and 2020, a big and popular section on my website was mostly down , though the rest of the website, including home page, were active. I am mentioning this in case it helps anyone with my question.
-Another change (highly doubt this is is relevant) is that in 2022, I got my .com version of my .net domain (both of them now point to my website)
-in the last 12 months , I have requests Google to crawl my website more than once.
[edited by: asas111 at 6:05 am (utc) on Aug 28, 2023]
