[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by kontrabass

Am I out of line blaming this mod?

Yes. All this add-on does is create a sitemap. If your rankings have dropped, it's because of factors having to do with Google, not the add-on.

The fact that public PR is constant is irrelevant, especially since it may not even accurately reflect actual PR. Higher PR does, however, generally increase the frequency of spidering. Beyond that, your rankings depend on "over 100 factors" - and one of the biggest is what's happening for that specific search term on other sites also ranking for the search term.

Note that a sitemap doesn't guarantee that Googlebot will change it's crawling patterns.