Losing number of indexed pages fast

[Rejf]

Hello,
I've been seeing some strange behaviour in Google for the last month or so.
I have a large website (no spam, no duplicate content etc)
For the last year Google indexed it very well, and number of inexed pages raised to over 4 mln.

Recently (for the last month) the number of indexed pages dropped to nearly 2 mln (and is still dropping every day) and what's worst - it's affecting number of visits.

I checked sitemap stats at the webmasters console and the numbers are almost the same (google is showing the same number with site: and with indexed pages in the console)

Has anyone been seeing the same situation with your websites?
I've seen some other websites losing pages but I haven't found any discussion on it.

I'm wondering if this is "normal" and have to wait or should i start thinking of doing something with it so I don't end up with my site deindexed..

Any ideas?
Thanks

[edited by: tedster at 7:15 am (utc) on April 17, 2009]

[Josuah]

Hey,

It's problably related with the Google algorithm update in March/April; if you read the forum posts about it, there is people with the same problem.

I also have it in one site, a big drop in indexed pages and don't know why. But since the last week seems to be going back to normal.

[tedster]

Hello Rejf, and welcome to the forums.

Losing half of your indexed pages is disturbing, but having 2 million pages in the index is still a BIG website. Google does "clean house" from time to time, dropping urls that it finds to be weak.

Many webmasters feel that to keep most of the pages from a site of a certain size in the index, you need a certain number of quality backlinks (the PR factor) - as well a site structure that distributes that link juice effectively throughout the site.

My guess is that you are not on the road to a total de-indexing for your site, but you certainly are right to take stock of the situation. Can you see any patterns that apply to the urls that were dropped - espcially any urls that were getting good search traffic?

[Rejf]

Hi tedster,
I thought about finding out which pages were dropped and try to find a pattern. Also get some backlinks and figure out how to make pages that they are not so similar. Maybe that could also be the reason

[gabriel_k]

Hi Rejf,

Please let us know if you find any pattern. Thanks.

[Coppercavanders]

Hello Rejf,

I too am facing the same problem with my website. Two days ago it had 1050 pages, today it has dropped to 845, though the drop is marginal but it still is disturbing.

I think to ensure all pages are intact, proper structuring of the website is important. I think we need to ensure that each page has atleast 2 or 3 pages link to it. Proper interlinking among inner pages can certainly help in mitigating this downward trend.

I have already started working on improving my structure. Will update once I see an upward trend.

Also, I think apart from interlinking, ensure you get links to your deeper pages from other trusted websites.

Cheers.

[wizboy]

I have seen the same drop on one of my websites, with exactly the same dates. It started dropping about the same time 3/15, and we saw our site: stat dropped from 1.8M to about 800k pages. We are not sure what caused it, and also investigating various reasons.

It seems like Google is not indexing the newer pages, which are practically all lower PR pages since they are all new.

Have you seen pages going back up lately? It read some other people's pages indexed have gone back up.

[Rejf]

Hi,
It stopped dropping pages for me about 2 weeks ago.
First, pages did come back (about 10k daily) but now it stopped.
Number of indexed pages is not changing at all since about a week.
I'm trying to do some tricks with link structure and adding some new content to already existing pages

[anallawalla]

I loosely monitor about 20 global Yellow Pages sites to check for indexing ups and downs and can confirm that almost all sites have lost from 60% to 10% of their pages and a couple have small increases in indexing. Most of these have no sitemap.xml.

The lost pages are no different from the ones still indexed.

This happened two months ago, when the same sites made spectacular recoveries afterwards. And yes, at least in our case, for a 25% loss of pages, traffic has dropped by 10%.

I'd treat it as a regular occurrence. Just overnight we picked up 300,000 lost pages.