Thoughts on removing the sitemap

I wish to remove the VBSEO sitemap from my site. Since installing it my google listings has only decreased and with it the traffic from google. I certainly don't blame the plugin - it works perfectly - but I blame google. I think submitting a sitemap can have a negative impact in some cases. Many sites will probably benefit, but some won't. I'm afraid mine belonged to the latter.

Anyhow, I'm, a little worried what will happen if I just remove the sitemap function, how will google respond? I'm worried that this could harm the search engine listing even further. Has anyone removed this plugin, and deleted the sitemap in the google webmaster tools? If so, what was your experience?

I really doubt that your experience or lack of - is caused by the use of the vBSEO sitemap, that is almost an impossibility unless you are using vBSEO as well. In that case forums will be dropped as Google begins indexing the new urls.

However if you really want to remove it, I don't foresee any major problems with Google or Yahoo having problems indexing your forum, but I would wait for one of the Developers or Support to chime in on this issue before doing anything.

Thanks for your reply. Of course it's impossible for me to know with certainty the exact effect submitting the sitemap have had. There could be other reasons for the drop in indexed pages (but likely not vBSEO as I've been using that at least 6 months longer than I have been using the the sitemap). At the very least I'm almost 100% sure it have not had a positive effect, and thus I see no reason to keep submitting the sitemap.

You are a relatively recent installation. Reduction of indexed pages is expected when vBSEO is first installed, because vBSEO helps the search engines to purge duplicate pages from the index.

This will change soon as your new page index count rises.

The sitemap will help Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp find all of your pages more efficiently.

I definitely recommend keeping it in place.

Remember - search engines fluctuate over time. I think you'll find that if you are patient (as difficult as that is sometimes) you will start to see a positive improvement soon.

Thanks for the reply. Well, the problem is that there shouldn't actually be any pages to drop since I installed vBSEO at the same time as vBulletin. Before that I was using ubb.threads, but that forum continues to run as a read-only archive. But of course those pages arte not included in the sitemap - they would be duplicate anyway since I imported all posts in to the vBulletin forum. Maybe that's what google is cathing up with.

Hmmm.... I think I will keep the sitemap for now and see what happens
I have made a few changes in the settings, especially the "priority" settings, where the "Smart Priority for Show Thread Pages" caused some strange results, with a lot of 0.9-1.0 threads (which I think is a problem when the forumdisplays were set to 0.8), so I've turned that option off and set all threads to a fixed priority. I don't know if it will help any but I don't think it can hurt.

Anyhow, Google is acting weird these days, and perhaps there's a change of algoritm or something like that going on causing the drop in SERPs. The effect being that none of my forumdisplays are showing up in the SERPs, but individual threads can be found (though ranking lower than usually). The forumdisplays does seem to be indexed though, very mysterious.

Crossing fingers that things will return to normal soon.