Number of indexed pages cut in half since May

[mcglynn]

Earlier this year I was tracking the count of indexed pages within various sections of my site, because we were working on increasing the count (by making sure dynamic pages had unique titles and META descriptions, for example).

I stopped tracking this in May, but happened to check tonight and found that across the board the count of indexed pages had been cut by half or more.

I searched a few times for relevant threads here, but I fear the answer would be locked up in 6 months' worth of "Google SERP Changes" threads, where not even Google can find it.

(How I count the number of indexed pages: via a google search for: [site:example.com/section/] )

Our search traffic has increased over this time, so unlike most of Google's changes to its crawler or algo, this one isn't actually costing us money. But it makes me wonder if Google pruned many pages it perceived as low in quality from the index. Has anyone else seen a decrease in spidering depth/breadth or count of indexed pages?

[tedster]

Yes, other members have recently reported the same thing, for example, in the October Search Changes thread [webmasterworld.com]. Like you, they also do not see this affecting their search traffic.