Are you saying that traffic from Google Search is down 50% - and if so, do you know which keyword searches went down? Are you getting any feedback you can use from Webmaster Tools?

happend with us two years ago when we submitted ours as well.

Short term ?

I have warned people a few times about sitemaps. They won't help you with

- crawling
- indexing
- ranking

There is no reason adding a sitemap for search engines, Google will find 100% of the URLs without a sitemap. For visitors I'm using a site search.

[edited by: SEOPTI at 10:12 pm (utc) on Mar. 12, 2008]

One time I think it makes sense if if you have hundreds of thousands of urls with a lot of product churn. Then I've seen help from autogenerating an xml sitemap with Python, and automatically pinging Google.

autogenerating an xml sitemap with Python, and automatically pinging Google

Me as well.
If I upload a new sitemap w/ new pages and/or fresh content, & ping Google -
Gbot gets there a lot sooner than if I just wait.
.

see comments in the other sitemap thread

Thanks everyone. Since that other thread is of longer standing, let's take any further discussion to that spot wo we don't spread out the information:

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