: Can a sitemap change result in a drop of visits? I recently restructured and resubmitted the sitemap for a website of mine in GWT. The old one was built by a script I acquired, which had

@Mendez628

Based on this "After having implemented URL rewriting" It sounds like you changed your URLs? I'd guess that had a bigger impact, especially if the old URLs return a 404.

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@Kevin317

It shouldn't have any effect on your pages' rankings. After all, its purpose is to tell the search engines what pages you would like to have indexed and where to find them. It has nothing to do with relevancy. But you see things like the Sitemap Paradox and realize it is far from a perfect system.

Having said that, the odds are it isn't your sitemap that caused any problems. Your drop in rankings seems to coincide with the "Panda" update Google has recently run. If your content is very similar to or exactly the same as content on other sites it probably has been devalued by Google. If this isn't the case it can be difficult to tell why they dropped as there are so many factors in ranking pages that narrowing it down to one thing is very difficult. It's even possible that your competitors just got better and you stayed the same.

If your results do not change soon I would recommend switching back to the old script and see if your rankings revert to their previous place. If they do then you know the sitemap is to blame.

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