Well, I have heard a lot of stories about the negativity of using Sitemaps, so I decided to share mine for those who care to listen. It seems that when I had a sitemap, some of my pages are on Google on some days, but goes off on certain times. So I decided to remove the sitemap, and to my surprise... I now have 7 pages worth of indexed pages. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's great that it did. I no longer use a sitemap, since it is too much work and I have too many pages, therefore, sometimes crashing my sitemap generating program. I will just let Google have it's own natural spider crawling habit.
Don't blame sitemap for not indexing. Sitemap can only help search engines organize your website, instead help indexing! Monitor the search by google in a week, you can still see that the results keep changing. It's not sitemap caused the change! Have a lot of outbound links will only help your indexing.
yea sitemap is just inform google abt ur pages it won't help u in getting ur site indexed if u don't have links pointing to ur site..
Well, start by putting a link to your website in your signature. You can now that you've been here more than a week. That gets you some 400 free links to your website, since you've made 400 posts. I think that just might make the difference. I agree the sitemap thing is not the issue here.
Same here. I did the sitemap thing. But my site had more then 50,000 pages and it showed some error and told me to create sitemaps in parts. I thought about doing it but didn't got the time. So removed the one that was in. And now it has many pages.
My indexed pages dropped immediately after adding a sitemap. So did my google traffic. You can play games with a company that has openly admitted they don't like SEO for profit but I'll leave it off of my stuff.
Nope, google said 0. By dropped I mean dropped in rank btw. I've seen similar reports all over. Not saying it's for every site but for mine it was definately a buzz kill.