Well after a 6 months of runngin sitemaps and google had 38,400 introduced sitemaps google went to 512, now reading the forums and removing sitemaps the count on its way up almost instantly?

So mny users have the same issue Google Site maps seem to deindex your pages.

2 reason only - your sitemap was not bult curently / not updated. or the other reason which i dont know about.

Hmm... Personally I don't see the need for site maps.

If the internal linking structure in a site is good, I personally belive that there is no need for search engine site maps; a search engine is usually smart enough to spider the pages on its normal organic links.

I didn't have sitemaps
and google didn't have all my pages

by checking search of link:http://www.cupantileandpaint.com

so know we built a sitemap

we NEED to get higher rankings in other search terms
we're number 1 for "charlotte tile contractor"
but for other searches no where to be found

I know, get more incoming links, we're trying

I have tried to build a few sitemaps for our article site with over 100,000 articles - but it doesn't work - we do however have an older sitemap that is partial uploaded to google. Google seems to notice the new pages which are all linked properly from the site.

Somewhere in the holiday season google has done a data refresh & that is the reason for the fall of ranking. Its no way concerned with your sitemap.

You can read this article:
Wednesday night, Thursday morning, forum threads starting popping up about a Google "data refresh" taking place. A data refresh is like a small Google update, and many webmasters have noticed a change in the search results at Google. Google has not yet confirmed that there has been an update, nor has there been a ton of discussion on the topic, as of yet. That is why I believe this is a "data refresh" and not a full fledge algorithmic change. Part of the data refresh seems to have put many pages into the supplemental index, an index that no webmaster wants to have their active pages included in. With any update, there are those who feel the index/results has improved and there are those who feel the index/results have suffered. I have more specific details at the Search Engine Roundtable, for those that are interested.

by Barry Schwartz

hey that was a cool info about sitemaps I was unaware of the version and updation of sitemaps

i used sitemap before, bit annoying for my case. and i not spending time to it any longer. i rather spend more time to SEO my site.

That shall be something else caused your ranking up. Sitemap has nothing to do with google ranking algorithm, it will only help google crawl your website.