Drastic decreases in indexed pages

[jetteroheller]

I just noticed at my and several other sites a drastic decrease in indexed pages.

I started the check after I saw on Twitter a message,
since we Twitter, only 1600 instead of 16000 pages indexed.

I hope this is only a coincident, because I started 3 weeks ago also with Twitter

[aristotle]

It seems unlikely to me that joining Twitter would affect how Google treats your website. Unless perhaps you made some spammy tweets that included your site's URL.

[doughayman]

Same problem for me; drastic decrease in indexed pages, as specified by "Site:" command. # is decreasing by the day.....seems as if there is no end to the downward spiral......However, the "site:" # does not correlate at all anymore to the WMT #, which has decreased some, but appears more stable.

[Seattle_SEM]

From where I sit Google is having really big problems right now. The size of their index keeps shrinking, or not growing as fast as the Internet.

I guess we just have to hope Caffeine fixes this.

[SEOPTI]

Old news, this has been going on since September 2009, in WMT usually you can see low crawling volume for your sites.

The URLs where there is less crawling/indexing drop from the index if a URL has not been reindexed within 2-3 months. If this is the case, the cache date disappears next to the URL first and then the whole URL will be removed.

Definitely overall a shrinking Google index.

[rowtc2]

jetteroheller , i suppose is a com site. When you search with site: command on Google de , jp ...what number of pages are showed ?

[SEOPTI]

I really think their site: command belongs in the toilet, this is the worst inconsistent query ever.

It was okay before September 2009 to do a site: query but the decreasing number is nonsense.

So the question is still how to find out which URLs are in the index and how many of them?

[edited by: SEOPTI at 5:11 am (utc) on Mar 16, 2010]

[bcc1234]

in WMT usually you can see low crawling volume for your sites

For one site, I'm seeing about 6k pages crawled per day as shown in crawl stats in GWT. And site command shows something like 5k pages.

The actual number of pages on the site is something like 150k.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

We have also seen a dip in indexed pages numbers both in WMT and through site: command about a month ago. Now they are more stable however, WMT still shows 50% less pages indexed from about a month.
The contradicting point is that the number of top keyword occurrences show an improvement in WMT which IMO should be directly proportional to the site indexing. So I am assuming that the site indexing stats in WMT is just a glitch while at back-end Google is indexing pages