Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
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Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down:
Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X.
Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly.
Thoughts?
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If it was only 2 days, quickly fix the sitemap and re submit it. I do not think Google will punish your sites rankings that quickly.
I would also perform a indepth search of links to the new site and see if maybe the site had some bad links and were going to get hit with a penalty for that.
You can also view this post for the 301 redirect
http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-penalties-be-passed-via-301-redirects
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How long has the site been non-existent? By non-existent do you mean none of the pages are in Google's index or that they are simply not ranking as high as they used to? If site X has been de-indexed, try resubmitting a corrected sitemap. It might take a little bit for Google to crawl and re-index, but I'd think then it would be fine. If you truly have been removed from Google's index, fix the sitemap and file a reconsideration request. I would think Google would recognize this as an honest mistake.
Good luck. I hope that helps a little.
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