I've had a sitemap for the 5-6 months for my website and noticed that google was indexing my site less. However there was a slight drop in me adding content and promoting the site. Anyway I just wanted to see if maybe my sitemap was making a difference so I've customized a few settings. After the experiment, I'll let you know how I went. My current traffic is about 50 visits a day, and about 300 keywords by the end of the month. and about 400 google visits. http://www.automax.tv <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"> <url> <loc>http://automax.tv/</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://automax.tv/Toyota_Hilux_Surf.html</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> </url> </urlset> However I noticed that my stats really dropped. So I'm experimenting and changine a few areas 1) A mistake I made was that I pointed everything to a www but my sitemap had no www. So I've recently updated my sitemap to have everything with www. 2) I read that from the official site <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority> were optional, so I've decided to remove them. 3)Removing spaces and intead used tabs in between words. 4) I changed and simplified the urlset. 5)submitted via google in gz format. So size is now 1KB I'll let you know if my statistics pick up and could prove quite useful. Currently my sitemap looks like this <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://automax.tv/</loc> </url> <url> <loc>http://automax.tv/blog</loc> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.automax.tv/Audi_A3_Cabrio.html</loc> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.automax.tv/Audi_R8_FSI_QUATTRO.html</loc> </url> I'll let you all know in a month, I've improved. My sitemap can be viewed at http://www.automax.tv/sitemap.xml.gz
I doubt that your site index drop could be because of your sitemap. Maybe something else on the pages resulted in it? Would be interesting to see your results at the end of the month.
Yep, ranking is not about sitemap. Sitemap is a way to submit all of your site's url to search engines.
Well my rankings for independent keywords, anyway the sitemap I submitted had a few more errors that I just noticed. Was up 1am working on it, but resubmitted so should be better now.
According to the current trend, the test results for May compared to April: 35% increase in key phrases 31% increase in Google search engine results However I did a few other steps that could have helped. - Validated html and css code. - Removed Scripts - Adjusted H1 and H2 tags. - Converted many tables to div's But overall, even before these changes, I was seeing a huge improvement and perhaps the sitemap can reduce your ranking based on complexity. My new project is to test if having your Title, Meta description and Meta keywords matched with your content will boost search engine results.