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
-
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 -
Google Search Results Flip-Flop
For a site we manage, Google can’t seem to decide which of two pages to present for a search for “skid steer attachments.” Almost weekly, it flip-flops from the home page to an interior page (which is a shopping cart category page that we have not actually optimized for the phrase.) The site is berlon.com. Have any of you had a similar experience and, if so, how did you address it? I’ve attached a Moz screen shot that shows the changes. mNfmJoY
Technical SEO | | PKI_Niles0 -
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Sitemap duplicate title
At the moment we have a html sitemap which is pulling the same h1's/ titles. How big a problem is the duplicate content issue which is medium priority in the moz pro softaware? Would you recommend changes as sitemap page 1 - page 2 etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VUK-SEO0 -
Should all pagination pages be included in sitemaps
How important is it for a sitemap to include all individual urls for the paginated content. Assuming the rel next and prev tags are set up would it be ok to just have the page 1 in the sitemap ?
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George0 -
What Google uses in search result descriptions
Recently, Google has started including certain information from our web pages in their search results description that is a bit puzzling. For example if you google 'Wedding Band Raleigh' the description they are using for our site's (GigMasters) page begins with the text 'Results 1 - 10 of 1005' Not sure why they are pulling that information. That is in on the page but its not high up on the page or marked with any special h1, h2, or h3 tag. We do have that information inside of a div which we have named 'Results'. Maybe that's why? Did we inadvertently use some sort of Google rich snippet or schema.org naming convention?! Any insight would be hugely appreciated.
Technical SEO | | gigmasters0 -
Partial mobile sitemap
Hi, We have a main www website with a standard sitemap. We also have a m. site for mobile content (but m. is only for our top pages and doesn't include the entire site). If a mobile client accesses one of our www pages we redirect to the m. page. If we don't have a m. version we keep them on the www site. Currently we block robots from the mobile site. Since our m. site only contains the top pages, I'm trying to determine the boost we might get from creating a mobile sitemap. I don't want to create the "partial" mobile sitemap and somehow have it hurt our traffic. Here is my plan update m. pages to point rel canonical to appropriate www page (makes sure we don't dilute SEO across m. and www.) create mobile sitemap and allow all robots to access site. Our www pages already rank fairly highly so just want to verify if there are any concerns since m. is not a complete version of www?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
More than 1 XML Sitemap
I recently took over administration of my site and I have 2 XML sitemaps for my main site and 1 XML sitemap for my blog (which is a sub-page of the main site). Don't I only need 1 sitemap for my site and one for my blog? I don't know which one to delete - they both has the same page authority. Also, only 1 of them is accessible by browser search. http://www.rmtracking.com/rmtracking-sitemap.xml - accessible in browser http://www.rmtracking.com/sitemap.xml - regularly updated in Google Webmaster Tools but not accessible in search browser. I don't have any error messages in Webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0