Sitemap Generator Forum

My XML Sitemap seemed to really make friends with Google on my new site.

Life was good, and my Google rankings were astounding me... many page 1 results. Then it just stopped. I went bananas, of course, wondering what was wrong. I was still getting a few page 1's, but they were all to my homepage... rather than the inner pages that should have been knocking Google's socks off.

Took me 2 days to figure out Google isn't finding my pages any more. I checked my Google webmaster tools and discovered only one or two pages were in the index, besides the home page.

When I look at the sitemap.xml, I can't find anything wrong. I don't have a robots.txt file in the site.

How do I begin to troubleshoot this?

thank you!

Greg

Google has some technical troubles and many pages fall out of  the index or lose their position, but most of them come back after few days or weeks.
So be patient, maybe it's temporary.

It depends how white hat/black hat your SEO attempts are. Just because you submit a sitemap to Google doesn't mean it'll immediately spider all the pages and rank them highly for you. It's just one step of many... personally I stick to plain text rather than XML formats.

Have you tried checking your sitemap for validity? Sometimes just an extra character errantly inserted or deleted can throw the whole thing out. Google Webmaster tools should also tell you if your sitemap is valid or not. I just wish I could find an easy way to automatically spider, produce a sitemap of and save it to the site on a daily basis (all automatically).

If I could do that I'd automatically generate a few RSS feeds too. That's the way to go with sites really, more and more automation...