I have a question. I have a site that is ranked in the top 1-3 positions with Google and it's over 160 Keywords. My question is that I have never built a site map or a robot.txt file in the past. I just made a sitemap and robot.txt file the other evening. Will this cause me to drop in the Search Engine ? I only ask because there were several keywords that I was ranked in the top 1 position with that I'm now in #2 or #3. Then there are some keywords that I was lower in that moved up to #1. Should a sitemap be done and robot txt file? Or should I remove this so it doesn't cause a problem? My site has been online for 7 years. Thank you
Basically, Sitemap is only for having "map" for crawler of search engine know your internal links; and Robot.txt is a list of several pages that asking crawler not to index those pages. IMHO, you can go ahead . and it won't affect your position at search engine.
moerdo, Thanks for posting. I was worried because I added the sitemap and bot.txt file the other evening and didn't think to ask if it would hurt my ranking. I have never done anything to help get my ranking up. I'm listing all over google with over 160 plus key words and ranked #1 and #2. I'm happy knock on wood.
Only thing you can do with Robots.txt & Sitemap is to tell the spiders about the sitemap @ robots.txt