Is the google site map really effective?

With the problems Google is having right now, could it be a good idea NOT to submit sitemaps?

I have lost my indexed pages twice.

The first time I had 12k pages indexed, and went all the way down to 1 single page, and that a phpinfo script that I linked too in the vbulletin.com forums.

All that happened because I moved the location of my "home" page outside of my root directory, without using a 301 redirect. Big no no! I've learned my lesson...

So I started over with google again, and quickly built up 54k indexed pages. Every morning I would manually resubmit the sitemaps generated the night before. Then the indexed pages started dropping again. I continued to submit my site maps. The drop still continues, and I have 11 pages left.

Now on the other hand, before I even used a sitemap at all, the number of indexed pages were low (less than 1k) but they never dropped.

Maybe there is something in this "Big Daddy" formula that works against us sitemap users?

As far as I can tell, the google problem has been fixed. I have been re-indexed a couple times in the past week or so.

I suggest submitting a sitemap once a week. I have no proof that this works, but i found that when I submitted daily, I would actually loose pages.

I am completely undecided on the sitemap at this point. I run 3 forums, onre of them is part of an entire website, one of them is brand new.

My two oldest forums both have the sitemap running.

First website/forum - several html pages, 63,000 posts in forum. Have run a sitemap for several months, and have 10,300 pages indexed.

Second forum - started in january, and ran the sitemap from the beginning. 3500 posts, 4 pages indexed in google. I was up as high as 500, now down to nothing. Do very well in yahoo and MSN however, go figure.

Third forum, just a couple weeks old. Has 27 posts. 45 pages indexed, 44 of those show to be vbseo optimized, and none of the page are supplemental results. I am running no sitemap yet on this site, and never have.

I am actually tuning mine down some as well. I had it running a new sitemap everyday and submitting to google. Changing that to once a month.

No problems here.

Originally Posted by sportsoutlaw

I am actually tuning mine down some as well. I had it running a new sitemap everyday and submitting to google. Changing that to once a month.

I also did this it seemed a bit spammy and unnecessary to submit more often.