Page Count in Google Fluctuating

Up then Down... What does it mean?

[Phil_AM]

On September 15th, our page total in G was 19,400 according to the SITE: etc.

On October 1, it was 19,700. Not a big deal.

Then 10/6 it jumped to 22.5k.

10/10 it jumped to 24.5k.

10/13 it jumped to 27k.

Now today, its down to 19k even.

What, if any, does all this mean? Is an update of some sort looming?

[robotsdobetter]

A number of members have reported that this is happening to them, so far it doesn't seem to mean much, other than that Google needs to fix their search engine.

[taps]

Phil: don't panic but keep an eye on it. It could be a hint that Googlebot found duplicate content. Check your logs for unwanted pages crawled by Googlebot.

Our page count tripled as Google found duplicate, better threefold content. This was caused by a defective robots.txt.

Doublecheck your robots.txt

[Phil_AM]

Thanks TAPS.

Robots.txt files is fine. In regards to dup content though, what exactly are they looking for?

For instance, my business partners with 700 other businesses and we resell some of their products. Rather than have 700 pages with completely unique content, we tend to reuse a lot of the content and almost all of the formatting for each business partner. Is that bad?

Also, we have a sister site that mimics our main site, in terms of layout and similar content but not exact duplicate content (for a different set of business sales). Is that bad?

Our site has been around for 6 years and achieved top 5 SERPS on 20 key terms through barely any SEO. What I mean is, we tried to build a successful business instead of a good SEO site. But in the last two months (since Bourbon) we've been dropping in SERPS like nbody's business. Top 20 if we're lucky.

Most disappointing...