I have sitemaps on one site, it got outdated and I am wondering if that caused organic traffic from Google to drop. The site can easily be crawled and I plan on automating the update of sitemaps. Will an outdated sitemap cause serps to drop even when the site is being crawled?
I've never had that problem and did not notice ranking drops even though many of my sitemaps are old. I don't create them anymore for sites that are easily crawled and indexed. I think Sitemaps are really only valuable on sites with flash menus or really large/deep sites that need the help in being fully crawled.
i think it may hurt your seo . if you have an active sitemap on google webmaster tools, it's better to update it daily