Google Sitemaps affecting my traffic!

This applies to only one of my sites, which is quite a large forum:

I had 97.000 links indexed in Google prior to using Google Sitemaps.
This 97k of indexed links, generated 3-5 thousand unique visitors per day.

I decided to use Google Sitemaps and in 3 weeks I've got 172.000 links indexed in Google.
But my traffic from Google search engine is down to 1500-2500 unique visitors per day.

This math simply doesn't make sense to me.
If I knew the result I would be more careful to use it.

Joe

 

hi,

I only tried sitemaps on a couple of sites because I didn't trust it. I haven't noticed any positive or negative results. You may want to check the sitemap or see if it was something else that caused it. That's pretty crappy though.

Good luck...

 

Tell me about it. I am looking all surprised that I have twice as many pages indexed, expecting it to double my visitors and exact opposite happened. Now I have only half of my visitors for this site.
Joe

 

I feel for you man.

I hope it clears up for you. You may want to just wait for a bit and see what happenes. Google screws me on a regular basis and I freak out but a month later they do something that helps. This could just be something that shakes out over the next couple of months. If you haven't already, try doing a search on the net to see if other people have had this issue. You may find something that way too.

 

bye the way, what is the forum, can I have a look?

 

I have seen an increase in SERP's on my main site after doing google's sitemap. Did you use the priority tag? I wonder if that would account for your site traffic being down?

How are your SERP's since you did the sitemap?

VG

 

Site is: http://www.groupsrv.com/

Do a Google search for how many pages are indexed:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=site:groupsrv.com

As I said, it crapped out completely.
I used 0.8 priority and daily changes.

Joe

 

try lowering the priority to 0.5 and upping it to 0.8 for the main pages or for popular topics. I heard that Google may not like it if you are trying to say everything on your site is just as important.

And you may want to remove any pages that do not contain useful info from the sitemap. Pages like login pages and things like that.

But I'm no expert, you may want to wait till someone more experienced replies here.

 

[As I said, it crapped out completely. I used 0.8 priority and daily changes.]

Go back and change that to 1.0 and in your meta tags robot it = 1/days that should get google to bot your whole site within a couple of days... After I lodge my sitemap with google where once my bots stats were a mere 80 .... now 480... however, I do add content just about everyday... and do have over 350 pages plus on my site...

I think if you are not being spidered well with a google sitemap.... you need to review how your sitemap was created ... make sure you have listed every page and change your priority to the highest as you can always change it back to 0.5 after google has done the initial spider...

 

Could google really be dumb enough to be fooled by marking everything as a 1?

And I didn't follow your robot comment. Please clarify?

 

I guess you missed the title. Google Sitemaps (BETA). Beta means buggy pre-release. Sorry to repeat this, but I would avoid Sitemap unless you really need to use it, or know what you are doing.

 

For hot articles and inforally how should I proceed ?

 

Since you are asking and you are already well indexed, I would avoid Sitemap.

 

Yes, I am indexed , but I receive only a few visits from google. What can be wrong ?

 

I can say without a doubt that the sitemap did not hurt my rankings or my traffic. But every case is different. This last algo update was good to me and I'm a very happy camper.

 

I think they've correctly identified your sites as search engine SPAM. I also see you are involved in Wiki SPAM. It took me about five minutes of research to determine this. I imagine it took Google less than one minute.

 

Why is my website considered SPAM ? I know that for search engine you need an original content, but if you can found any articles on two or more website this is not spam. Tell me what is wrong with that site ?

Thanks!

 

Or am I being stupid here?

 

first thing u need to consider that have made sitemap manually or by using automated tool? As manually always prefer.

 

This was posted in 2005, you notice that. I'm guessing by now his site has totally changed.