I am confused, sometimes I think it’s impossible but at times when I see people complaining every once in a while, I am forced to believe that something is up with it.
In this post I’ll try to present an ongoing debate between the left and the right side of my brain with the help of two fictitious characters Mr. David and 
Mr. John. Both are webmasters and understand the working of search engines and importance of Google Sitemaps. Read more about John and David here.
David believes that submitting sitemap to Google can in no way harm his site, while John thinks that it’s quite possible. Here is an excerpt taken from their heated up debate happened last night.
When the debate turned bloody:
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The situation: John seems angry with something while he’s in front of his pc. David is sitting on a couch reading some ancient novel. Suddenly, John yells:
John: what the f**k? never thought Google could be so evil.
David : What happened?
John: I am seeing quite a few of people complaining decrease in their traffic after they submitted XML sitemap to Google.
David: what rubbish.
John: I can show you examples
David: sure. let me see them
John: see yourself, here and here
David: utter nonsense, I’d say these are just pure coincidences
John: No, I have seen more cases like this, this is too much now
David: Ok! but have you ever thought why Google would do this?
John: yes, because after submitting the sitemap, they can study the site more closely and try to find issues which were otherwise hidden from them.
David: But, not all people submit their sitemap, Google can’t do this to a handful of webmasters, it won’t be fair
John: yeah exactly, they can only fix what they can see
David: that doesn’t make sense at all. By the way, are you anti-Google?
John: Shut your f***ing mouth! you…
The agitated John throws his wireless mouse towards David, hits on his nose, starts bleeding…..
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Four interesting things coming out from the conversation deserve second look:
1. they can study the site more closely and try to find issues which were otherwise hidden from them
Hidden? not exactly. But still, they can study the site more closely with the help of a sitemap.
2. why Google would do this?
They want webmasters to use Webmaster tools. Then, how can they turn them off by doing such things?
3. it won’t be fair
David has a very good point. Not all the webmasters are sitemap aware. Google just can’t penalise some of the sites based on issues they come across while analysing sitemaps.
4. they can only fix what they can see
John strikes back here, again a vary strong point. May be Google has decided that they would fix the issues on first come first serve first fix basis.
By the way, which side do I support? John or David?
Both. That’s very diplomatic but I really have no idea. David’s points look more factual so I am more inclined towards his thoughts. But, I myself have seen quite a lot such cases where submission of SiteMap to Google had something to do with the SERPs, penalties and number of indexed pages.
Has it happened to me?
Yes, same thing happened to one of my blog. It was a new blog, getting 150 uniques a day. I thought of optimising more and submitted its sitemap to Google. Traffic dropped by 80% in next three days. However, the rankings came back after some 7-8 days.
To me, submission of sitemap and decrease in traffic seemed to be related to each other in my case. Still I can’t deny the possibility of a coincidence, it was a new blog after all and SERPs were shaky as expected.
Wait! What about John and David?
Fortunately, David and John have now become friends again after the bloody fight. They have agreed not to discuss about this topic again when they are together.
Ok, some other time, but we’ll surely try to shed some more light on this topic, as we study Google’s behaviour more and more while we come across more such cases.
This is it for now. David and John are around. So I better change the topic from Google Sitema…. Shhhh…
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hi, i just went through some of your posts. Within a short span of time, you seems to have succeeded in adding some great posts. Good work. Keep it up.
Thank You. :)
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i thnk the traffic is loss is somewhat temporary…i hope google don’t do this…an if they do its really unfair