Out of sheer curiousity and slight boredom I decided to start using the “Google sitemap”:https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login xml file on this site about a couple of months back.
Not that I entirely care too much about search ranking but since I did this my ranking in Google dropped dramatically, I would say that my site pretty much just disappeared from the results. Why? because the xml wasn’t built properly, which was my fault, I used one of the sitemap generators that are floating around on the web and hadn’t updated the file since new pages/content was created on my site.
So, a bit of advice. If you’re going to implement the sitemap xml file on your site, make sure you update regularly and make sure it’s correct, because it could work reversely and have negative effects on your Google search rankings.