Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention.
It’s important to note that, a sitemap is just a backup crawling/discovery mechanism that Google uses to index your site. Even without a sitemap, Google can crawl and index your site URLs. So, there’s no connection between your traffic drop and the sitemap.
The error “no referring sitemap detected” means the page has been discovered, so Google knows about it. In 99.9% of cases going forward, it’ll then just swing by and re-crawl it once in a while (with no reference to the sitemap). Google might find your URLs by other means. It’s completely fine.
A sitemap has absolutely NO role in boosting traffic to your website.
Your site map is simply a list of pages on your website. Google uses it to help discover new pages, but there are some caveats to that, as well. Let’s start with the basics… First, Google’s own statements about the sitemap here: Sitemaps FAQs:
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2008/01/sitemaps-faqs
Why traffic suddenly went zero is something you need to investigate in the Google search console and I would suggest going through this URL to understand more and how to recover:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/diagnosing-traffic-drops-using-google-analytics/
You can check for URLs in your Google Search Console and look for any coverage issues that may help you track further issues on why your traffic dropped.
We hope that helps. Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
