Same day our sitemap finished processing in G WebTools, our SERP results Tank!
-
Need a little help troubleshooting an SEO issue.
The day our sitemap finished processing in Google Webmaster Tools, almost all of our keyword serp results tanked. Our top 4 keywords routinely were placing from 11 - 33 rank in serp result and now they're not even on in the top 200? Would the sitemap processing have anything do do with this or should I look somewhere else.
FYI: Site is build in DNN, sitemap is fine and robot.txt file is good.
Open to all suggestions!!
-
Hey Ben,
Thanks for the reply and I agree with you that is was pretty much coincidental. We had updated quite a few things on the site since so I am assuming that was the cause.
Thanks,
Charles
-
Hi Charles,
I wouldn't have thought a sitemap could have resulted in a penalty. Unless of course it linked to pages which violated Google guidelines which hadn't been crawled before.
I would consider other things before sitemaps, what changes did you make to the site recently? Where there any algorithm changes around that time?
The last few months have been quite busy for the search engines, it's quite possible that it's just coincidental.
Ben
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Showing wrong image in the SERPS
Hi Guys, In organic SERPS Google pulling incorrect product image, instead of product image its showing image from relevant products, Checked the structured data, og:image everything is set to the product image, not sure why google showing images from relevant product sidebar, any help, please?
Technical SEO | | SpartMoz0 -
Sitemap.xml Site multilang
HI all, I have some questions about multilang sitemap.xml. So, we use the same domain subdirectories with gTLDs example.com/pt-br/
Technical SEO | | mobic
example.com/us/
example.com/es/ How should I do the sitemap.xml in this case? I thought of three alternatives: Should I do a sitemap_index.xml to each lang and make categories for these sitemaps? Examples:
http://www.example.com/pt-br/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.example.com/en/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.example.com/es/sitemap_index.xml Should I do only one sitemap_index.xml covering all categories of all languages ? Examples:
http://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.example.com/pt-br/sitemap_categorias_1.xml
http://www.example.com/es/sitemap_categorias_1.xml
http://www.example.com/us/sitemap_categorias_1.xml Should I do a sitemap setting all multilang? <url><loc>http://www.example.com/us/</loc>
<xhtml:link <br="">rel="alternate"
hreflang="es"
href="http://www.example.com/pt-br/"
/>
<xhtml:link <br="">rel="alternate"
hreflang="us"
href="http://www.example.com/us/"
/>
<xhtml:link <br="">rel="alternate"
hreflang="pt-br"
href="http://www.example.com/pt-br/"
/></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url> Thanks for any advice.0 -
Mobile sitemap needed for responsive website?
I've seen some older 2012 posts that discuss, but nothing recent given the new changes to emphasize mobile. For website that are already tested and verified as mobile responsive, is best practice to develop a mobile-specific sitemap and submit that as well? Or will any mobile crawlers spider the regular sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Addion0 -
Using a single sitemap for multiple domains
We have a possible duplicate content issue based on the fact that we have a number of websites run from the same code base across .com / .co.uk / .nl / .fr / .de and so on. We want to update our sitemaps alongside using the href lang tags to ensure Google knows we've got different versions of essentially the same page to serve different markets. Google has written an article on tackling this:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en but my question remains whether having a single sitemap accessible from all the international domains is the best approach here or whether we should have individual sitemaps for each domain.
Technical SEO | | jon_marine0 -
Sitemap do they get cleared when its a 404
Hi, Sitemap do they get cleared when its a 404. We have a drupal site and a sitemap that has 60K links and i want to know if in these 4 years we deleted 100's of links and do they have them automatically cleared from Sitemap or we need to build the sitemap again? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Link to Articles for news sites in Google SERPs
I'm trying to figure out why when I search for "international news" or "world news", for example, some sites in the SERPs have links to news articles, while others don't. For "international news", result of Fox News and New York Times have links to articles, while CNN (the top result), only have sitelinks. I would appreciate any theories on why this happens. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | seoFan210 -
Differences in Sitemaps SEO wise?
I'm a bit confused about sitemaps. I'm just learning SEO so forgive me if this is a basic question. I've submitted my site to google webmaster using http://pro-sitemaps.com and the sitemap generator it creates. I've also seen sites do this: http://www.johnlewis.com/Shopping/ProductList.aspx and http://www.thesafestcandles.com/site-map.html so I did something similar for my site (www.ldnwicklesscandles.com). You figure you see everyone do it you might as well try it too and hope it works. 😉 So I've done both 1 and 2. Which sitemap is best for SEO purposes or should I do both? Is there any format that should or shouldn't be used for Option 2? Any site examples for good practice would be helpful.
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Updated title tags not displayed in SERPs?
A couple weeks ago I updated the title tags and URLs of some of my site's top landing pages, but the new versions aren't indexed in Google. Webmaster tools says that my site has been crawled since updated. I'm using a pretty old version of Joomla for a CMS, and had to fight with the plugins a little bit to make it all work (sh404SEF for the URLs and sh404SEF Custom Tag Module for the title tags). For example, www.radiussecurityinc.com's indexed title is still: Radius Security Solutions | Home But should be: CCTV System Design - IP Industrial Surveillance | Radius Security Other pages besides the home page have the old title tags as well as old URLs. Any ideas how I can fix this? Thanks a lot in advance! Jeff
Technical SEO | | jaysan0