Dropped pages - misery loves company

[Joy6320]

In February one of my small web sites of about 40 pages of original content (mostly scholarly articles) dropped to 13 indexed pages. In April 21 pages. Now at 20 pages. Because misery loves company I am interested in knowing if your sites are still missing pages or are more pages getting indexed?

[Lorel]

I have 3 sites affected by this. All three have very little text on affected pages (about a paragraph) and or they are inside directories, i.e., not directly linked from the home page. We are adding more text to those pages and linking some of the pages from the home page to see if that helps.

[texasville]

Yep. dropped pages are low content. Widget pages with descriptions. But...I have many informational pages that are nothing but text, and lots of it, and they all went supplemental.

[LifeinAsia]

Forty going down to twenty? Try 3.2 million dropping down to 200,000! Please- you have no idea what misery is.

[egurr]

I hope this is within the rules of the site. We are releasing our quarterly search engine report and I'd like to know what type of sites are experiencing dropped/supplemental page issues. It's difficult to find a good site having this type of problem because obviously it doesn't show up in the SERPs.
Our stability tracking at Google is not showing wide fluctuations. Anectdotally we have seen a few very clean sites go supp. Our test site also went supplemental other than the index page. The site is about 250 pages. 100 pages are just directory type pages, another 100 pages have scraped content from the article distributors, and about 25 pages were built with excellent content.
In MSN and Yahoo the good pages still rank at the top of the SERPs, the bad pages are nowhere to be found (which we would expect). Some of the directory pages rank, most do not.

If you're so inclined you can send me a sticky of some of the sites you are having issues with and we'd like to evaluate them and comment on them in the report. Let me know if I can mention the your sites in the research. If not I'll certainly respect your privacy. What we're looking for is original content, well written and informative sites that should clearly be in the index, that have gone supplemental or been de-indexed.
Eric

[dinnerware]

Still missing pages. Have 6,000 pages on an ecommerce site and we get 600 indexed. We used to have tons of them indexed.
Our biz is down, I am stressed and no one has an answer.

[Dayo_UK]

I have had pages of 600-700+ words of my own content dropped too.

Not all dropped pages are low content.

[Play_Bach]

Pages indexed using site:www.example.com for one of my sites have been jumping around here too:

June 5 => 61
June 11 => 349
June 18 => 563
June 21 =>260

misery IS company ...

[Play_Bach]

June 22 => 95

[egurr]

Thanks for the sticky mails and keep them coming. So far I've looked at 7 sites. No clear pattern is emerging. Three of the sites had no advertising at all. All had unique content, although one was a little thin on quite a few pages. One in .php the rest were all fairly clean .html.
Five of seven of the sites were either very good content, or very small sites for local businesses.
I'm still looking for a pattern but at this point it seems almost entirely random. If something emerges I'll let you know but this is clearly not a filter issue. I have not found any site that is higher than page rank six with this problem.

[jrs_66]

Based on the Matt Cutts response I got and his responses to others, I believe the deindexing problem is simple to explain. It is a matter of PR, new PR which is not yet displayed in the toolbar. It seems google has added the ability to drop useless, tit for tat link exchanges to their PR algorithm. It seems to me that all sites, including mine, that have seen this problem are either fairly new, not developed many inbound links or have over done link exchanges. I would love to be stickyed any sites which don't fall into one of these categories. If you don't have the PR to support it, don't expect your 1 million page site to be completely indexed in google anymore. This is not some sort of content (or lack there of) penalty. Seems pretty simple really...

[ashear]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, these fluctuations are driving me crazy.

[egurr]

If you don't have the PR to support it, don't expect your 1 million page site to be completely indexed in google anymore. This is not some sort of content (or lack there of) penalty. Seems pretty simple really...

Like I've said this does seem to track with PR4 more than 5 and we haven't seen anything like this with PR6 or higher. The odd thing is why are the sites with 10 or 20 pages getting the boot? Most small business sites have a PR of 3.

[jrs_66]

--- Most small business sites have a PR of 3.

I disagree. Most legit sites that have been around for 2 or mores years are a 5, even without any major link development push. Most (all?) PR 3 sites are not completely indexed. does anyone have an example of a PR 3 site which is over 100 pages and indexed completely? I'd love to see it. I'm hoping that the silver lining in all of this is that the mass link exchange requirement of the past is now done, thus making it simpler for non spam to rank... time will tell.

[lorenzinho2]

< It seems to me that all sites, including mine, that have seen this problem are either fairly new, not developed many inbound links or have over done link exchanges.

Nope. We're not new, have plenty of organic inbound links, and don't do link exchanges.

Many of the pages that have gone supplemental are light on content, but there are also a bunch of others that have fairly deep, unique content.

[egurr]

(I disagree. Most legit sites that have been around for 2 or mores years are a 5, even without any major link development push. Most (all?) PR 3 sites are not completely indexed. does anyone have an example of a PR 3 site which is over 100 pages and indexed completely? I'd love to see it. I'm hoping that the silver lining in all of this is that the mass link exchange requirement of the past is now done, thus making it simpler for non spam to rank... time will tell. )
It's true. On our last research we evaluated over 25,000 pages, most were PR3 a good number were as high as PR4. Very few SMB sites were PR5
Do a search on a local type of business.
For example cityname real estate, auto dealers, etc.
Then check the reg date. Many are four or five years old, some even six or seven. They are PR3

Most of this can be attributed to updating the site and changing urls, but it doesn't explain the PR of the home page.

[oaktown]

jrs_66

If I understand you correctly, this will kill blogs, won't it? Most of the have tit for at limk exchanges just a matter of courtesy. Or am I confused? (Again)

[paulanthony]

I've been affected by this too.

894 pages down to 395

PR 4.

[LifeinAsia]

It seems to me that all sites, including mine, that have seen this problem are either fairly new, not developed many inbound links or have over done link exchanges.

I have to disagree with this also- our main site is over 4 years old, has 46,000+ ibl, and we do not do link exchanges.

[jonathannelson]

we are over 10 years old. we have a PR of 8. we have close to 30 million pages indexed. we have over 200k quality IBL and no link exchanges. misery loves company.

if you're out there Google...Godspeed on what ever you are trying to fix right now.

hang in there folks ;)

[Play_Bach]

Pages indexed:

June 22 => 95
June 25 => 576

Going back up (at least it is today!)

[Jane_Doe]

I have some sites with dropped or supplemental pages and for me the reason is always very obvious - not enough page rank, not enough high quality links, not enough content on the pages, etc.

[Patrick Taylor]

close to 30 million pages indexed.... over 200,000 quality IBL

Amazing numbers. How does anyone - Google included - manage sites like this? Maybe the site is just too huge for its own good.

[ruip]

I have two PR3 without dropped pages in index.

One is a little site with 39 pages indexed and flash,
4000 visitors a day, and yes i have links, automotive related all, some with exchange others without.
traf increase 10-15% after 26 April.No deep links.

the other is a phpshop site with 19000 indexed pages.
any external link.

I loose pages in a Pr4 why, the diference is title, this two are diferent titles for individual pages, i loose in PR4 (phpshop)abc store green ... and abc store red. I remove abc store and guess... that pages reapper in index.

New site MAY 2006 - little one - all pages indexed in 3 weeks, 650 pages. I try use title again abc store green
abc store yellow, wrong dropped to 45.
I remove abc store ... now title it's green and yellow only i'll see in next days.

[Scott_F]

Yes, I also have a client that sells personalized widgets, 1000's of them, each on very unique. They use to have nearly 4,000 pages indexed and now they have only 1,200.

Why is this bad? Because when people are searching specific products, mine are not always showing up anymore.

[nzap]

We dropped from 13,000 to 958 on one site.

Our main keyword rankings are still there for the most part, although one of our major keywords, which is a very competitive 2 word phrase for our industry, dropped from its long-held position of #1 down to #2.

Other main keywords seem to be intact, although I am not certain how some of our secondary keyterms may have been effected.

[rden17]

my number of indexed pages has been changing Daily for the past 1 1/2 weeks. My stats look like a roller coaster. Let me off this ride, I'm gettin' queazy!

[kidder]

2 weeks ago 500 pages 1 week ago 12000 pages - day before yesterday 17,000 pages - yesterday 623 pages. Today 22,000 pages.

Traffic is up and down, this is similar to what I saw a few weeks back with our site - site: command shows internal pages coming in first. It took over a week to get the index page back on top and we are MIA for a few of our popular key searches. I am guessing it will settle down again. It's hard seeing your competition getting the clicks but I guess we all get a turn in the barrell..........

[LuckyGuy]

Today are huge dropps in site: command. Yesterday 5800 indexed pages, today 588.
Second domain: 688 down to 3 pages?

Is this still the site: command fault?

Just as the link: command it shows 5 BL, Yahoo and MSN have over 2550 BL.

[Lorel]

Two sites I manage that are affected by this problem both have a lot of pages missing from the index and both of them don't have those pages linked from the home page but from another page, i.e.,

home --> directory-> productpage.html

Most of those pages have about 1 paragraph of very unique (not copied anywhere) text on them--on which we are currently adding more text.

I'm also getting links for the most important pages to see if that helps.