What is the Impact of XML sitemaps

this is an issue happened with me when i have added new xml site map to my site and submit it to Google. all the old pages that been indexed over the past 3 years were removed. and my listings on SEPRs dropped and removed.... i want to discuss this issue with SEO experts. as i'll be adding xml sitemaps to my clients. does that affect their ranking? or what happened with me was just a special case? it's really an important issue so any one has a point to add would be appreciated.

An XML sitemap can't do damages on such a big scale. You must have some other issues. I don't use XML sitemaps and don't recommend them. They are good for nothing. If you have some crawling/indexing problem then fix them. You can't force search engines through sitemaps to crawl and index all of your pages.

An XML sitemap can't do damage period!

Google states that an XML sitemap does NOT in any way influence your search results.

All it does is tell Google about the URLs on your site, even if you put in incorrect date it will tell you there is an error.

What happened with your site must have been due to some other reason like a data center switch of an algorithm update.

To dismiss the value of XML sitemaps as being worthless seems perhaps a little extreme.

For a small site, their value is questionable, but for medium to large sites the ability to notify search engines about new or updated pages in deeper parts of the site is very useful. It could take days (or even weeks) for the search engines to locate these additions/alterations from a standard webcrawl, whereas an XML sitemap can alert them to it within 24 hours.

Sure, there are other ways of doing so -- social bookmarking the pages, linking to them from the homepage, etc -- but this is not always possible, nor appropriate.

Any decent CMS should automatically create XML sitemaps for you, so they require no time or effort on your part to implement.

Back to the OP's question:

As has already been mentioned, ordinarily there's no way submitting a sitemap can harm your rankings. The only time I've seen XML sitemaps cause issues is when they contain URLs that are different to those used on the site, yet still function, thus creating duplicate content problems.

A sitemap can do huge damage... if the creation of it sucks your resources and slows your site down enough you'll lose rankings.

That would have to be one massive sitemap!

The sitemap protocol deal with massive sitemaps by having a sitemap index and I think 10,000 or 100,000 (can't remember which) URLs per map.

Creating these files can be done offline on a development platform.

Most CMS' have a sitemap module, so you just have to make sure it won't drain you.

Notice you don't see any http://www.myspace.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.facebook.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.twitter.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.boston.com/sitemap.xml etc...

this is my site map and i think i have done it correctly.
www. shoesuperstore.com .au/ sitemap.xml

the new thing i done to my site before loosing the results is creating and submiting the site map

The sitemap should not be affecting your rankings at all. Try placing the following in your robots.txt file and resubmit to Google:

Sitemap:http://www.domain(dot)com/sitemap.xml

thanks i'll try that

Hi linkhunter,

I have followed your advice above and wanted to double check that this is the proper way of doing it.

User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: (mysite/sitemap.xml)

Thanks

As mentioned above you don't see any http://www.myspace.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.facebook.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.twitter.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.boston.com/sitemap.xml etc...

MySpace alone has several million web pages.

Not even yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/sitemap.xml

Which is the most popular website in the world

And if you think that these sites are not bothered whether or not the web pages get indexed cos of there huge market share and visibility, then what about ebay and amazon. Where are the XML sitemaps on these two most popular e-commerce website.

And where is the XML sitemap on the seochat.com?


Google recommends XML sitemaps. But I have always faced some sort of problem when i used XML sitemaps. And not using it won't cause any harm to rankings. So i just don't use it.

A couple of points...

1) XML Sitemaps are nice to have in place, just for the peace of mind. They might not be worth great effort, but if they can be easily done, why not!

2) XML Sitemaps do NOT have to be located at /sitemap.xml - so just because you can't see them for various public sites by typing that in does not mean that those sites don't have XML sitemaps.