How permanent is a 301?

When setting up vBSEO on my 4 year old forum, I started to realize how much more there was to SEO than I knew. I got a little perplexed at the www vs non-www thing and many posts I read had a comment that 'www is deprecated'. OK, I had SERPS in both www and no-www. I knew it would be great to consolidate so I set 301 redirects to non-www.

I realized later that day, (while nowhere near a computer), that 95% of my SERPS where probably www. I ran home and changed those redirects to send everything to my www.

If I sent a 'permanent' 301 redirect to Google, and then changed my mind and reversed it, will they get annoyed with me?

I ask because my newly submitted sitemap (vBSEO 2.5), has sat un-indexed for 48 hours now.

So, how permanent is 301 permanent?

301 means the resource has moved from THIS location for Good. ie, permanent. it will never be back here. As opposed to a 302, moved temporarily, (possibly good uses are for mirror sites when bandwidth overloads, etc; not commonly used).

I doubt there is a relationship to your sitemap.

Make sure all 3 match:
- site url in vboptions
- htaccess
- preferred domain in webmasters tools.

Then, clear out all your xml.gz files and re-generate the sitemap so you know it contains the correct url structure. Google will NOT accept 301s in sitemaps, only valid 200 "good" urls.