Same day our sitemap finished processing in G WebTools, our SERP results Tank!

[Firecracker]

Need a little help troubleshooting an SEO issue.

The day our sitemap finished processing in Google Webmaster Tools, almost all of our keyword serp results tanked. Our top 4 keywords routinely were placing from 11 - 33 rank in serp result and now they're not even on in the top 200?  Would the sitemap processing have anything do do with this or should I look somewhere else.

FYI: Site is build in DNN, sitemap is fine and robot.txt file is good.

Open to all suggestions!!

[Audiohype]

Hi Charles,

I wouldn't have thought a sitemap could have resulted in a penalty. Unless of course it linked to pages which violated Google guidelines which hadn't been crawled before.

I would consider other things before sitemaps, what changes did you make to the site recently? Where there any algorithm changes around that time?

The last few months have been quite busy for the search engines, it's quite possible that it's just coincidental.

Ben

[Firecracker]

Hey Ben,

Thanks for the reply and I agree with you that is was pretty much coincidental. We had updated quite a few things on the site since so I am assuming that was the cause.

Thanks,

Charles