Drop in indexed pages across various countries?

[baaa]

I started to get worried when I noticed that 10 of our sites (in 10 different countries - mainly Europe) were consistently dropping pages from the main index every single day... (site:domain.com)

So I checked our competitors in all those countries... and sure enough, every single one of them was experiencing the same thing, some of them huuuge drops in the number of indexed pages.

Strange thing is, it has not really affected our traffic. In fact, it seems to be increasing (slowly but surely:))

So what is happening? Are you guys seeing a drop in indexed pages lately? And more importantly, why is this happening? Google algo change? To what? Sooo many questions, so little answers... :)

[tedster]

Google's algo changes all the time, almost every day in some way or other. I think what we're seeing is the fact that the site: operator report is losing accuracy. It started happening months ago, and it's only getting stranger right now.

The ksy is this - are you getting the right traffic. And since you are, treat the site: operator results with a healthy suspicion. It's still better than the link operator, anyway.

[baaa]

You're right, I am getting traffic and this indexing issue (as far as i can tell) is having no effects on it (but.. would i have more traffic is there were more pages indexed?)

But site:operator used to be a sort of KPI - if we were doing good there, we would see it in the traffic stats.

Last year we could even see supplementals etc, and that helped us a lot too.

Now, its beginning to seem that we have lost yet another tool that helped us understand what was going on...

[edited by: tedster at 6:42 pm (utc) on July 2, 2008]
[edit reason] turn off graphic smiles [/edit]