Couple Google questions

I dont f with SEO much other than the standard layout issues, keywords and so on. But studying search engines is fairly new to me.

I put up a site about 8 months ago. I got about 30 hits a day from google. I had about 12,000 pages indexed.

Out of no where hits started dropping off and there was an error in my sitemap. I had over 20k pages total so I thought I would rebuild the sitemap and resubmit.

So for the last 5 months, I get 1-2 hits per day from google. About 20 from Yahoo.

Did I fuck up by resubmitting my sitemap? Or is something else going on I dont know about? I also noticed that last month I had 300 pages indexed roughly according to google, as of today there is 127. I havent changed a thing.

Any ideas? Do the de-index?

Well, since your site was no longer regarded as somewhat "authoritative" for awhile, my guess is a few sites got in there that they just like better. Now there's this "new" guy (that's you) trying to get in, he has no authority and they like the older content/site setup better for some reason. There could have been some small algorithm modifications in the past 8 months too, and search habits change.

Solution: Research SEO as much as possible. Can't really troubleshoot SEO problems that well, you just kind have to force your way in however possible. Or if your lazy, check out the Marketplace here and buy a mediocre package from a broad spectrum of services one at a time, and just see what works.

*Purely Speculation* - but there's no definite answer here.

What kind of content are you pushing in your pages? That's a lot of stuff if it isn't related to the target topic/theme/niche of your principle site.

Without seeing the page itself, it is hard to say but, sounds to me like you have been dropped/de-indexed due to your lack of common thread content.

The biggest problem I see when this type of thing happens to a client of mine, it is due to their articles or content getting old. It isn't only about how much content you put on your site but even more so about how relative it is to your site's audience and google's opinion of it as an authority site in the first place.

I highly recommend that if you haven't already, re-build your sitemap again but only after you catalog your content better. Most people fall into a sandbox due to not rotating their content into an archive style system. If you have a bunch of articles as content on your site for promotional purposes, archive those pages.

Think of it by the layout and standard of a blog system. A blog will catalog what you do over months at a time and post it into nice, neat lists for that given month it was posted for reference. That is why blogs will rank 500% better than a standard website time and time again.

Try changing your layout up that way, so that you can keep all of the past information in your site but keep the fresh content as the current page listing that the bots crawl for your main page content feeds across the board, for your blog, articles, news, etc.

Keep it clean and organized. If the bots don't see new content and rotation of material more often, they will toss you to the side for a site that does. It is a very common death trap.

Everytime you rotate in something new, the oldest thing has to come off and go to archive. Rule of thumb for me has always been to never keep anything more than a month without archiving it. Anything over that and you are out of date with not only google but all of the search engines.

Study up on this stuff and get it worked in as part of your daily routines. People fall short all the time, thinking that you can post a site that is set to go without knowing that the money makers online ALWAYS continue to tend their content. It is like working a garden, you have to take care of it if you want it to bear fruit.

Sorry so long and hope this helps.