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XML Sitemap Leads to loss in ranking and traffic in Google.
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I have submitted XML sitemap in Google's webmaster tools for some of the categories of my website. after submitting the sitemap i have seen the drop in traffic and ranking of keywords for the categories tof which sitemap was submitted.
The other categories for which i have not submitted the sitemap the ranks have not changed.
my sites alexa rank is approx 3000
Please help me out should i remove the site or change the priority of the urls which i have fixed in the sitemap?
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just leave it. Double check for errors on it.
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I believe you should leave the sitemap as it is for now. and Work on improving the quality of your website; The Pages, Design, Link Structure, URLs, Content... I mean everything
Improve the quality score of your pages and your rankings will surely rise again
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hi Dennis
so what do you suggest should i remove the sitemap or leave the sitemap as it.
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Hi Mrtijn
the categories are the top performing categories from the websites. i have done the keyword tracking the keywords from the categories having the sitemap have gone down. whereas the keywords from the non-sitemap categories have remained stagnant or move up.
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if it was indeed caused by submitting the sitemap, its too late for you to worry about it. My vote, another coincidence. Ive actually experienced this twice and i got my rankings back by analysing where i went wrong with the tech/structure.
With an alexa like that, you probably have a big site. Try to find a "main" problem and fix that first rather than going for different changes all at one time.
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I've seen such behavior before, but I'm also pretty sure that it's not related to just uploading the site maps itself as it's just a signal to Google to where they can find the (new) pages. Are the category pages of low quality or is there something else which could cause this?
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