Lot of people seeing a spike in "non-indexed" pages from WMT

[smithaa02]

Somewhat of a continuation of this thread but deserves its own topic:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Basically as most of you know, you can monitor how many pages are non-indexed from WMT.

Have any of you experienced any suspicious drop-offs in these numbers the past month? One of the sites I monitor when from 5k to 4k on 1/9/2013...which is really odd. In the above mentioned thread, some are seeing even bigger spikes in their "non-indexed" numbers.

Anybody notice a common theme with the pages not indexed?

Could this be a sign of a big change or update to come?

[menntarra 34]

Just to be precise: it is called "not selected" pages in WMT under "Index Status" section.

[deadsea]

Keep in mind that "not selected" is not just pages. In my case the "not selected" are almost entirely 301 redirects.

Its not useful for me for Google to report things other than actual pages that it has chosen not to index. I'd prefer them to have lines for "pages indexed", "pages not indexed", "errors", "redirects", and maybe "other".

Another bug with this graph that affects me is that subdomains get rolled up. I have example.com (no www) that serves my English content and es.example.com that serves my spanish content. I can't get stats on just my English site because all the language subdomains get rolled up under it in these stats.

In my case, the numbers on the graphs of indexed pages haven't changed in months.

[g1smd]

Have you registered es.example.com in WMT?

You're saying the graph for example.com and for es.example.com is the same?

[deadsea]

I registered es.example.com separately. It shows the correct number for that subdomain. example.com shows the totals for all of my subdomains (so many times the actual number).

[g1smd]

Ouch!

How difficult would it be to have the English site on www.example.com or on en.example.com instead?

[deadsea]

It started out English without a www (don't see the need to make the url longer and more complicated). I added languages on subdomains much later. I could redirect to en.example.com I suppose, but there is some SEO risk with that. Other than this particular tool, it doesn't cause any problems that I'm aware of.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Affiliate link redirect pages are all being called "not selected". Link directly to the destination or re-route links through a shortener that is not on your primary domain if you wish to avoid this. I recommend the first option. You can also set up a new domain to handle all of your redirects but this may be counter-productive if Google decides they don't like your site because it links to a low quality domain excessively.