Visits slowing and page numbers declining

[rjwmotor]

Got a problem here. After the last PR update I've noticed something concerning. PR dropped by one point on all interior pages, home page remains PR3. I am not getting as many referrals from G though it appears that most major rankings remain unchanged.

About a month ago I had over 1600 pages in G's index. Putting the "/*" after my domain name showed about 163. My understanding was that these 163 were in the "real" index and the rest were supplemental.

My concern is that those 1600 pages have now dropped to under 900. They appear to be falling by about 50 a day now. The "/*" still gives me about 160 so I'm wondering if I should be nervous or on the lookout for something?

Nothing major has change on the site.

[tedster]

It does sound like more of your low PR pages might be getting dropped from the index. However, currently the site: numbers of all kinds seem to be a bit buggy, as they often are.

The more important concern is the drop in traffic. Have you pinned down which pages are getting fewer visitors from Google search results?

[rjwmotor]

I really haven't been able to determine that. Visits do slow some at this time of year but I haven't seen them this slow in about 4 years. I'm assuming that I'm losing some of my long tail as major KW's still rank.

Does the "/*" really indicate what is in G's live index or does it still pull stuff from the sups?

[tedster]

It was always a hack. It never was confirmed by Google, but it seemed to do the job back in the day when the "Supplemental Results" label was still showing. Now we have no way to confirm any accuracy to those /* results.

Sometime you can get insights by looking at searches on AOL - since Google supplies the data. The site: operator numbers there are usually a bit lower than the /* hack shows on google.com.

I'd strongly suggest you drill down into the specifics of your traffic loss. Find out which urls are getting less traffic, and which keywords have dropped off. Assumptions can be dead wrong, no matter how intuitive they seem.