I’ve been using this product for a few months now and I absolutely love it! But, can someone please answer a question about “Submitting Sitemaps to Google”? After using this program and submitting my sitemap to Google, my article pages were being indexed by Google in as little as 1 hour in some cases! I was extremely excited about that! However, I have begun to notice that of 12 new article pages (optimized for keywords with very little competition) NONE of them are ranking for the optimized keyword anymore. I am totally confused? Several pages were ranking very high, but after I started submitting my Sitemap to Google, my pages seem to have dropped off. Coincidence or is Google doing this? I have read a few opinions online that discourage submitting sitemaps. They claim it can actually “hurt” your ranking.

Has anyone had any positive experiences with submitting sitemaps to Google in terms of high rankings? Please don’t take this as a knock against the software, because it is very useful for me, especially with creating the RSS file and HTML sitemaps.

Sitemaps are no holy-grail. You're only helping Google find the content that it will also find on its own. Consider where the content lives on your site and how it is found from the top of the site down - "how many clicks does it take." The farther from the top of the site, the less significant it is in the eyes of "The Google."

Spin this again about your keywords and targeting - not knowing your site, this is general advice - if an article about "Blue Ribbon Hogs" happens to live beneath a category such as "Helicopters", the page will never rank. Themes and keyword threads need to be consistent.

Last but not least - who else links to those pages? If you are the only one linking, you may have a problem pulling rank.

Hope that helps,
Steve