What a waste of time that was..

Just a quick first time post from me...and hopefully a warning to
others from my own experience.

I set up an online store (oscommerce) in June 2005 to supplement my
retail store, registered with msn yahoo google search engines..no
problem, site appeared OK in google search results. Came across this
sitemaps thing in september and signed up for it then BANG....site all
but disappeared from google to the extent that if I now search for my
store name in my home town I rank about 31st I think it was last time I
checked. Product search results contain info from august and products
added to the store since august simply do not appear.

The spider does visit the sitemap product URL's, no errors show on the
login page, 404 error return is set up ok, and sitemap is validated OK.
So, over the last few months I think I've done pretty much everything
to comply with what google is expecting to find. Well apparently
not!!!....so now is the time to kick google into outer space. I still
get great results from msn, yahoo and others.

What is this big deal with getting into google rankings anyway??..From
taking part in this sitemaps beta thing I have learned that google
returns me wrong information for what I'm searching for...like if I
search for my store in my town with some other keyword I would expect
to be on the first page at least...but no...so something is seriously
wrong I think with this search engine. I realise that things have to
move forward and google were obviously trying to do that with this
sitemaps thing, but to be honest I think they shot themselves in the
foot with this one.

So now's the time to say goodbye to google, I managed ok without it
since signing up for sitemaps so pretty sure I can manage without it
from now on, and will save a lot on wasted bandwidth too.

Fortunately it has had no impact on my business, I still have a retail
store plus referrals from the better search engines that list correct
information for my site regards products/prices. But I do feel sorry
for hardworking people who have built up a business online solely and
had it destroyed by googles incompetence with this thing, even if it is
a free sevice they offer.

I have now deleted the sitemaps and disallowed google in the robots txt
file, does anyone know a full list of google spider ip addresses
anywhere so I can add them to the banned ip's in the site cpanel. Oh,
and does anyone know the best way to get the old pages from my site
from showing up in googles list?? I would rather there be nothing
rather than old info and prices from last august showing up.

Regards
Ex Google Sucker