GWT Indexed Pages Going Down While I Add More Pages

[dickbaker]

At the beginning of this year, Google's Webmaster Tools showed about 2,000 pages indexed. That number went up to about 2300 in July, and has been dropping steadily. Today GWT shows 2185.

During that same time I've added over 500 pages of new fresh content, and have been getting links to the pages. Google shows the ~3000 pages I have on my sitemap, and the site: operator shows many, if not most, of the new pages.

So, pages that were previously indexed are being dropped as new pages are added.

I can't figure out what's going on.

Any ideas?

[tedster]

It sounds like the WMT numbers are munged, doesn't it. You may be better off focusing on which URLs are getting Google Search traffic, rather than which are showing in the main index - that's a major challenge anyway. But how many pages are getting traffic is something that you verify, and it's quite actionable, too.

[networkliquidators]

It's basically, "what is popular today, may not be tommorow". Also, your navigation structure will use most of your site's internal link juice.

If you have a blog site or article site, most articles that are recent will receive the traffic as long as your authority for your domain is there. As older articles are pushed back, their traffic may go down if they don't have enough external links to them.

Also links to the section where your main content is hosted will also influence how deep the Google machine passes juice. For instance, if I had a "recent updates" section for articles or forums, I'd make sure to link build that page as much as I could.

[tedster]

pages that were previously indexed are being dropped as new pages are added

Are you tracking that by the actual URL,or only in aggregate by looking at the top level totals? In my experience the only relatively solid way to know if a URL is indexed is to paste the full URL in the search box and see if there's a result. And even then, YMMV depending on differences between data centers.

I've been monitoring one very large multi-language domain that cycles up above 80% indexation and then down below 50%. All through that roller coaster, traffic remains relatively steady. That's why I would rather focus on how many URLs actually get Google traffic.

[g1smd]

Another website with almost 7000 pages shows only 300 URLs listed in the WMT "internal links" report, but interestingly the root page of the site is reported as having 130 000 internal links pointing at it. Clicking to see a list of those internal pages returns a list of just 20.

That's complete rubbish and it's been wrong for just over three months now.