Sitemap Index & 4 Sitemaps

I created 4 sitemaps for a very large site with a sitemap-index. I submitted each one to Google Webmaster Tools.

Everything was going great until I submitted the site-map index. 4 days later the site was banned. NO Google referrals.

In Webmaster Tools Sitemaps, Google is saying "URLs submitted" the number of urls the 4 other sitemaps add up to.

Should I have only submitted the index and not sitemap1, sitemap2, 3 and 4 or visa versa... and not all of them?

Should I remove the 4 sitemaps or the index of the four sitemaps?

 

Iwould suggest either e-mailing them directly or file a reinclusion. Good Luck!

 

Swirleigh, you should just add your sitemap index file that contains all 4 sitemaps. You don't need to add your 4 sitmeaps too. It is quite enough to submit your sitemap index file. But I don't think it can be a reason to be banned by google.

 

I would remove the sitemap index file to solve this. I have submitted 23 site maps in my web master account for the same site with no problems.

Google allows multiple submissions of site maps for a site.

 

Yeah, you're right. It wasn't the sitemaps. I did delete the 4 individual sitemaps and kept the sitemap-index.

I then back tracked every single change to the site and discovered nearly 5000 new links coming from nearly identical pages on different domains. We had talked a company into changing links on their client's link pages from our competitors, to ours and they had pushed changes live August 1st.

These sites were poorly indexed, the links pages weren't indexed and I doubted most of the sites were even listed. I was mostly happy about removing our competitor's links. I thought if anything, it would take Google months to find most of the sites and even longer for them to eventually deep crawl down to the link pages to find our links. But it took them less than a couple of weeks! And our organic Google traffic flat-lined August 24th.

I submitted a reconsideration request last Thursday, admitting the pages of our site that were recieving the massive amount of new links. And was very relieved to find our SERPs and traffic returning this Tuesday. wwWwwwwhew.

 

Thanks for the info. Something to remember by all.

 

So you are saying by getting a load of backlinks at once, you run the risk of being banned by Google? How many is too many then...?

 

Taiwan, I don't think so.

 

i think it's not related with your sitemaps.

did you give a link to any bad site or made any big changes for your site?

 

Too many links too soon I believe was the problem.

I experienced it in the past, pointing every page of our site to a new site of ours before it was even indexed. Google didn't list it for three months. I changed sitewide link to no-follow and Google listed it within a week after that.

In both cases, links were 4000 plus.

 

I have submited my sitemap.xml, .html, .ror, .sitemap with well over 75000 pages and have had no issues at all (knock on wood)