Which pages has google indexed?

[David_Reed]

I wonder if anyone could enlighten me on the pages of my website that are indexed by Google? My site only consists of ten pages and sells one exclusive product.

About a month ago Google de-indexed 10 of my pages leaving only 2 indexed. I can see this information in webmaster tools but the information I don't have is exactly which two pages avoided the chop.

Is it possibe to discover which two pages these are?

Thanks for any help

Dave

[mrengine]

Have you gone to Google and tried the site operator?

site:example.com

This will show what pages are indexed.

[David_Reed]

Yes. Just did that and all pages showed up. Just confused as to why Google webmaster tools states that only 2 urls are indexed. Looking at the graph it displays I can see when the number of indexed urls dropped from 10 to 2 over a period of 14 days. This coincided with a massive drop in site traffic and more importantly a fall in sales.

[netmeg]

GWT is often inaccurate in this respect.

[David_Reed]

Thanks for your thoughts. Odd that my traffic dropped dramatically when google insists it de-indexed my pages. I probably should have mentioned that the site always appeared in the top few results in googles organic listings. Now it's not in the first 20 pages. Guess I'll just put it down to the algorithm change. How to improve the situation is the big headache for me.

[RedBar]

I feel there's something very awry with Google indexing right now when using site:example.com.

I am seeing three new sites pages and images bouncing in and out like a yo-yo, one site is bouncing between 50-200 pages, today it's 58, its images have gone from 0-50-100-200-38 to 13 today and that's over the last couple of months.

The entire system seems to be very unstable at the moment for new sites. New pages and images on well-established sites seem to be fine ... at the moment!

[JD_Toims]

GWT is often inaccurate in this respect.

FYP: GWT is often inaccurate.

[David_Reed]

My site had been running since 2010! Google suddenly took a dislike to something but I can't for the life of me fathom out why. WMT says everything is fine apart from only now indexing 2 pages.

[lucy24]

You need to distinguish between "gwt says it's indexed" and "it is indexed". If it shows up on a site: search, then it hasn't been de-indexed. Same goes for an exact-text search.

You can also check whether the pages have been bumped down to #900-something. No, you don't need to click Next ninety times ;) Click Next once, find the bit of the new URL that gives the starting result number, and manually edit it.

[FranticFish]

Hi David and welcome.

Checking the 'site:' query WITHOUT the 'www' will show you if it's anything simple like your site being crawled 'wrong' and the wrong version of pages indexed (perhaps https pages).

Because of load balancing, this could hit different data centres from query to query, but if you keep seeing the same thing over time then you I'd trust that more than what GWT might display, because I see plenty of erroneous messages about Googlebot not being able to index sites via WMT.

If it's not a canonical issue, or a crawling issue (robots.txt perhaps) then you have bigger problems. Checking the exact date when things went wrong and then cross-referencing that with announced updates might help you start to diagnose the problem.

Good luck finding out and fixing the problem.

[David_Reed]

Thanks FranticFish. I'll definately do that as there is a very precise date when the indexed pages disappeared (along with the traffic!)

Lucy24. I don't quite understand what you are saying.
"find the bit of the new URL that gives the starting result number, and manually edit it." Don't understand what you are saying there.

[aakk9999]

Lucy24. I don't quite understand what you are saying.
"find the bit of the new URL that gives the starting result number, and manually edit it." Don't understand what you are saying there.

The URL to edit is URL in the address bar, after you have performed your search and clicked on the "Next". When you click "Next" once, check the browser address bar. You will see something like: &start=10 in URL.

Changing this to (for example) &start=600 and hitting [Enter] will take you to 601st result, i.e. to page 61 (assuming you are looking at 10 results per page). This way you can go quickly to the end of the results by increasing the number.

Add &filter=0 to the URL in the address bar to show the SERPs with the omitted results included.

[Robert Charlton]

Whatever the accuracy of WMT, traffic drop/loss in sales (my emphasis added) appears to be true...

Looking at the graph it displays I can see when the number of indexed urls dropped from 10 to 2 over a period of 14 days. This coincided with a massive drop in site traffic and more importantly a fall in sales.

So, in this case, whatever WMT is showing may be more relevant than the site: operator. The usual advice is to ignore WMT when there's a reporting disagreement, and to use traffic as a gauge.

Perhaps WMT is reflecting something like a "supplemental" status... telling you that even though the pages might show up in a site: search, they're effectively supplemental and not of much help.

Regarding the timing of the drop... Google's making it harder to cross-reference drops with other activity, but I still look at timing in trying to diagnose the problem. At the least, big algo updates are usually noticeable.

How long has the site been up? Maybe your previous rankings were due to a "honeymoon" period that Google grants new sites.

How did you get your backlinks, from what kinds of sites? Were they blog links that might have scrolled off of the blogs' top pages?

If the page sells only one exclusive product, was it an EMD? Lots of possibilities.

How can you characterize the site and the product, without getting into specifics, and what more can you tell us about how you built the rankings that have dropped?