Drop in site: results

[castor_t]

I do a site: search for my site regularly in Google. It has been stable for a month or so at 2500 links. But recently the count dropped to 1450 and has stayed there since a week. It happened to all of my sites, some of them dropping from 150k to 100k. Did anyone experience such a thing recently or am i being penalised?

[drall]

Castor_t has your search traffic dropped? If your search traffic hasnt dropped I wouldnt read to much into this.

Our largest site dropped from 80,000 results to 12,000 results in the site: command and it's traffic remained stable and actually increased. Unless your traffic has dropped I wouldnt worry about it to much.

[castor_t]

There is no change in the traffic. But I wonder why the site: results dropped all of a sudden

[tedster]

I'm seeing the same on several sites this month - drops of 20% or more in indexed pages are showing, but there's no loss of search traffic from Google. Either the numbers are buggy or those pages didn't do much good anyway and the big G is housecleaning.

I know they watch search result impressions, even if the entry doesn't get clicked. If impressions are too low, I assume that is at least one of the criteria for Google not to deal with the URL any more.

Another possibility - this one in the buggy area. Sometimes if you have a simple enough directory structure you can do site:example.com/directory-1/ style searches right through the entire site architecture. Add the numbers together and the total is more than you get with a site:example.com search.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

For one of my client site, indexing droped to 20% or original about 10 days ago which currently stands at 80% of the original. So I think this is just a glitch at Google's end as no traffic differences were noticed.