There are so many questions here really before it's clear what the cause could be, some of these include:-

1. Are these from other sites you own? One would presume so if you access to remove the links?
2. If so, are these sites hosted on the same server as the domain they were pointing to?
3. Did the sitewide links contain keywords as the anchor text or were they branded?
4. Why did you choose to remove the sitewide links in the first place?
5. Did any of the other websites containing these sitewide links suffer recently as a result of algorithm updates or decline in rankings.
6. The page(s) that the sitewide links were pointing to, does this have other existing links still pointing to it? What % were they were reduced by after the removal of the sitewide links? And of those existing, are they a mix of nofollow/dofollow?

Often, the removal of mass of backlinks will cause a drop as you've experienced. Normally because it's a major shift in the link profile and doesn't look 'natural', providing there was legitimate reasons and there are no other issues that can be raised against the domain in question, often, ranking positions are pretty much reinstated again.

Incidentally, how we often get round this scenario is to keep the sitewide link in place but write a script to only make the link on the homepage followed - and all the others add the nofollow link relationship.

Are you removing sitewide links on other domains pointing to your website or are you referring to sitewide internal linkage within your own site?

Hi Michelle,

So you're 404'ing the old sitemap URL yet you've placed the new sitemap at the same location...? If you want to private message me your domain, I'd be happy to take a look for you.

There should be no need to 404 anything, just replace the old sitemap and Google will do the rest. Alternatively, just recreate the new sitemap index at a new location such as domain.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml.

Thanks

Potentially quicker to rank well if you built back up on a fresh domain with no poor history, but that being said, whose not to know if Google have methods in place to identify if domain owners do this - potentially via comparing content, code and copy. You might end up redoing everything on your website just to be safe.

Sticking with the same domain just means that you have to build a relatively significant amount of natural links to bring down the same anchor text ratio vs total external backlinks in the profile - do-able though if you subscribe to a few blogs and regularly comment to articles and maybe write some content for publication at toy (or other related) blogs - ensuring that you avoid blog rings/link networks/farms though.

View your link profile here.

Links are mostly coming from unauthoritative sources and mostly contain the same anchor text. This will be what you have to work on, start building natural links with varying anchor text to counterweight the poor link profile and history on your domain.

It amazes me that there is still discussion about dofollow social bookmarking websites, article spinning, automated backlink sourcing and the like.

Focus your attentions on other efforts that matter, other efforts that will prove genuine, legitimate and natural.

Sure, if you feel a social bookmarking websites such as Mister Wong will drive targeted traffic to your website, go for it. The likelihood is, it won't. Social bookmarking has had it's day really, few of them are really great traffic drivers and even those that are, the value of the traffic is questionable.

I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on sourcing dofollow links only, it's not natural, it only indicates to a search engine that you're trying to game their system. A handful of relevant nofollow links that send traffic is going to prove far more useful than a handful of dofollow links from websites that no-one ever visits.

There are plenty of automated tools on the market to produce what you're after, but expect to get penalised further down the line.

Is the problem that you have old URL's still indexed in Google or that Google Webmaster Tools is just displaying / accessing your old sitemap?

1. Delete your old sitemap from the server.
2. Delete your old sitemap from Webmaster Tools.
3. Submit your new sitemap to Webmaster Tools.
4. Ping your sitemap to Google here.
5. Check your web analytics to see what old URL's are still being accessed.
6. If the old URL's still won't leave Google's index you can either block them with robots.txt, request a index removal request within Webmaster Tools.
7. You can also add your new sitemap to your robots.txt so search engines know where they should be looking.

Let me know if none of the above answers your question.

What exactly are you trying to achieve? No rich snippet markup from schema.org is required to embed a testimonial into a page. If you are intending to provide additional information to a search engine which helps gather a better understanding of what your website is and does so they can display markup in the search results, then this would be where you would use the appropriate markup.

You may want to research the rich snippet markup for reviews to see if this is appropriate for what you're trying to achieve. It may be useful to read my other response to a schema related question I wrote a few moments ago too.