The Importance of Sitemaps for Search Engines
THEN I FELL OFF GOOGLE!
I couldn't understand it at first, I don't do paid links, I don't hide text or links, I don't cloak or use 'affiliates'. I am white hat! Fortunately Google provides Webmaster tools www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and a quick look there showed what Google thought about my site.
Firstly I had upgraded my site and left the old sitemap there. The crawler had a look at the sitemap, couldn't find most of the links it contained and decided my site was junk. You can make a new sitemap and wait for the bots to return.
Secondly, to give my pages a theme, I had created a master page and saved as a fresh page after I'd inserted content. Google didn't take kindly to that - I had the same Meta descriptions in all the pages. I had the same titles for all the pages...duuuhhhh.
So I re-edited the pages and the crawler will return, life will resume.
It's quite frightening the power that Google (which is something like 90% of the search market) possesses, it can turn off leads practically at will. It at least strives to be democratic and meritocratic (& useful) rather than a tyrant, let us all hope that it keeps that ethos.
I would heartily recommend the webmaster tools, Google is trying to help.
About the authorDavid Foster has a great deal of experience in the imagesetter and prepress industry, rather less in SEO. You might like to learn from his mistakes. http://www.positivityltd.co.uk/
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