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Wordpress - Sitemap question

by Irwin Dominguez
2 replies
Fellow Warriors:

I built a wordpress site about 3-4 weeks ago. I optimized the site to target a keyword; I made a static home page to target the keyword and made 4 posts (1 of them a duplicate copy of my home page) targeting related keywords - I launched all of this at the same time when I built the site.

In addition to other plug-ins (privacy policy, quick adsense, etc.) I used google xml sitemaps to generate a sitemap for my site. I ranked in google relatively quickly (2-3 days after building the site), but since then my rankings have been jumping all over the place (#75, #125, #150, #220, #350,) and now for the past week I'm not ranked in the top 1,000 at all.

I've read about the google dance, but I don't think my non-ranking is related.

Additional notes:
  • I've made various changes to my site during the past few weeks (made test pages, etc.), but have not changed the original content mentioned above
  • I verified my outsourced articles posted to the site were not duplicated content based on a copyscape scan (and googled various text from the articles on google)
  • I took various images from google images to post on my site
  • I've made one round of SEO via link wheel (made various web 2.0 properties and pointed them directly to my niche site; used UAW and social bookmarking sites to point to the web 2.0 properties)

I have a few related questions to my issue:
  • Any idea(s) why my site is not ranking anymore?
  • I'm a little clueless when it comes to sitemaps; as mentioned above I used the xml sitemaps plug-in initially but when I checked google webmaster tools no sitemap was submitted (I manually submitted it today). I thought that the XML plug-in was supposed to submit my sitemap to the various search engines; why didn't a sitemap show up when I checked in google webmaster tools?
  • Could the omission of the sitemap be the reason my site is not ranked anymore?
  • When I make changes to my site do I have to update my sitemap each and every time manually?
  • Will I get penalized by google for having duplicate content on my site (1 static page as my homepage and an exact copy as a post) (I did this so the "homepage" would show up as a category on the sidebar?


Thanks so much for reading this novel of a post . Any help will be greatly appreciated - thanks!
#question #sitemap #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author BackLinkiT
    Not sure I understand why you think you are not google dancing? Sounds exactly like you are dancing to me. Stick with it, your site will come back.

    I'd also be careful taking images from google images for your site. Copyright may be an issue.

    The sitemaps plugin updates itself automatically each time you post.
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