I successfully submitted my XML sitemap to Google and almost immediately all my stats disappeared. “Not available at this time”. I didn’t notice right away but over a few days my Google traffic went down to zero. I am now in the proverbial Google Sandbox.

I am hoping that this is a temporary blip. Perhaps submitting the sitemap has caused all my pages to be reindexed. But when I search for my pages using my keywords, that just a few days ago were working - well, I am just not there.

Based on my late night research into this phenomenon, others have had similar problems but are unsure why this has happened.

One thing that has crossed my mind, but I am usure whether this is related, is that my site displays as either http://neenmachine.com or http://www.neenmachine.com. When I created my sitemap, it was generated using the plain neenmachine.com. (There is an option in the plugin to change this to www. but I did not zero in on this when I created mine.) But in Google Webmaster Tools I had set my preferred domain as http://www.neenmachine.com. When I submitted the XML sitemap I did get an error about a mismatch so I changed my preferred domain at Google Webmaster Tools to http://neenmachine.com. Per the Google Webmaster Tool site changing this setting will cause my pages to show up as http://neenmachine.com in the search results and also will cause the crawlers to see both the www. site and the plain site as one and the same.

I came across some discussion that there should be a 301 redirect in place so that the plain site is redirected to the www. site. At this point I don’t know how to do this and I am unsure whether this is the reason why my pages have fallen in Google’s search results, so I am not going to change anything - yet.

I will keep you updated. If you have any insights, I would love to hear them.