What effects on SEO after submitting and removing sitemap

I want to remove the sitemap after submit, because I did not want to be crawled by competitors.Should I submit a sitemap to Google or is it better to let the crawlers index the page by themselves?

I removed the sitemap on my best site nearly a year ago and did not suffer ANY noticeable ranking loss. The site, being older and well established, is crawled regularly and the sitemap was not providing any real benefit imo.

By removing it I have realized a performance benefit since it is no longer drawing resources from my database.

I can't say that I noticed any change in Bing/Yahoo either though I didn't watch them as closely. I gather stats from other sources so I didn't need the information provided by GWT but it is useful if you have to internal tracking.

erikacroker said:

because I did not want to be crawled by competitors.

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Removing the sitemap won't make a difference to this, you would need to block the bots manually using code in your htaccess

Rarely seen removing sitemaps to dramatically impact a website. Just make sure your internal link structure is good and the site has no big technical issues.