Google dropping my site pages

From about 8,000 pages to 4,000

[ebloggy]

For some reason, Google not only has not been crawling new pages in my site (it has stayed at 8000+ pages although my site has grown), it has suddenly start dropping them.

When I search the term '<snip>' in Google, I get only about 4000+ pages now. What gives?

Is anybody experiencing something similar?

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 3:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2004]
[edit reason] we don't do specific keywords - thanks [/edit]

[ThomasB]

The number of pages indexed in Google is determined by a couple of reasons:
- PageRank (usually you can say that you get more pages indexed when you have high PR links pointing to your site. Google stops following links at a certain point when the PR of the linking page is too low)
- number of links (if you have lots of deeplinks to internal pages of your site they also have some PR and cause GoogleBot to follow links from that page)
- Content (Google stops spidering if they reckon you don't have genuine content)

Conclusion: Get good and unique content that people link to.

[ebloggy]

Do dynamic pages affect Google spidering significantly?

[uncle_bob]

Sometimes google seems to drop pages from a site before it re-spiders the site in depth. But there are 101 reasons google could have dropped your pages.

Trying to understand google is like trying to understand women. While it may be fun to try, both are futile persuits.

[ncw164x]

Trying to understand google is like trying to understand women

That mean's we will never understand google then ;)

[sahuman]

I believe some day we would be able to understand Google...

[darqSHADOW]

I believe some day we would be able to understand Google...

And I believe that as soon as you understand Google to get high ranks, Google will change its algo again. ;)

Its in Google's best interest to stay ahead of the SEO community, simply because once you "know how to beat the system", they have to change it, because you will always have the black-hat's who abuse it.

DS

[wanderingmind]

I am seeing something strange.

Since morning (in India) today, I am seeing 60-70% of my site (which has been indexed) appearing and disappearing in Google.

It stays that way for one hour, reverts back to showing all pages, back to few pages and back again.. seems to change every hour.

Any ideas?

[Dominic_X]

I've heard reports that the total number of pages returned in results on various phrases has taken a significant dive recently.

If it is the case your problem is probably related.

The suggestion has been it may be to do with the implementation of something like topic sensitive pagerank.

Has anyone else noticed the number of results returned taking a dive?

[zaqwsx3]

Yes I am seeing the same thing. My results are now down 75% from what appeared back in late August 2004 (the last 25% drop hit me today - Oct 4, and i'm in Australia). I believe it's the same concern which is discussed in the thread titled '22-23 September Google traffic dropped dramatically'.

My PR is still the same (according to the Toolbar and other web-based PR calculators).

It would be nice to hear from G themselves on what might have caused this, as there's a lot of speculation occuring.

[greenfrog]

I am experiencing the same thing on my server. Many different sites hosted on the same server are losing pages or losing page info (title,desc). It appears that each time that a page gets read by googlebot, it begins to drop from the index.

I am not sure what is going on but it is affecting many of my sites.

[Liane]

The disappearing page syndrome is not unique to just a few sites. I have made a few inquiries and have heard back from most that I contacted and they are all reporting the same thing. I don't think there is anything to panic about ... just yet. I honestly don't think it has anything to do with filters, or anything else anyone thinks Google may be zapping.

I think Google has had a fairly major problem with their index over the past several weeks. I wrote in another thread (a couple of days ago) that a search which typically returned 2,290,000 results was only delivering 222,000 results on the "weird" data base. A significant difference!

However, since this morning, that same search is now delivering 3,000,000 results which is encouraging!

After doing a lot of searches over the past two days, ALL other searches which I track (in excess of 300 keyword phrases) were also showing deminishing result numbers.

I think they may have that problem licked and you will see your disappearing pages suddenly reappear shortly.

Let's hope anyway! :)

[sit2510]

>>> Is anybody experiencing something similar?

Yes, but I don't think you should panic. I think you had just hit another index of smaller database where G shows only about half or 3/4 of the total pages. At some other intervals, you may hit the ones with larger databases where most of your crawled pages are shown.