I was tooling around with some things in my hostgator c-panel and it said you should submit your sitemaps often to Google, so I pushed the button to re-submit them, and ever since, traffic to my site has slowed down drastically. Did I do something wrong? Are the two even related?
no there is no such trick regarding increasing pr it is because you got a good quality backlink from your competeters or from .edu .org .net .mil these backlinks will really bost up your site to pr may be
In front of you submit the button , the GOOGLE need to research all of your information again . So , in my opinion , it is usual . Take it easy , wait one or two days to check the traffic .
You can check the sitemap submitted to google from webmaster tool and then if there is any mistake, submit a proper one. There are many threads in this forum that details how to generate a proper sitemap. But I think the sitemap is probably not your problem.