Adverse Effect After Adding 9000 Pages - To Rectify, NoIndex OR Remove?

[zoltan]

Starting from September 14, we gradually added about 9,000 pages to our domain that is online since 2001. The indexed pages by google was 3,000 before we added the additional 9,000 pages.
We have noticed that the majority of pages that ranked well before lost their rankings starting from September 16. I guess the whole issue is that we added the 9,000 pages too fast.

The question is: what is better, should we completely remove all the 9,000 pages we added or is it enough if we noindex,nofollow these pages.

Your comments are appreciated.

[zoltan]

I believe that the domain itself had a score that has been distributed so far to around 3,000 pages. When we added 9,000 additional pages, the same score has been distributed to 12,000 pages. The effect was that some pages that received traffic before now lost this traffic and we see basically 0 traffic to pages that were good landing pages before. Obviously, we probably received some visits to the new pages we added, but overall the traffic to the whole site dropped by around 50-60%.
Another change we did in the last 2 weeks was to make the site responsive. The look is pretty much the same in desktop as it was before but now it is also responsive.

Was there any other google algo change after 16 September that could affect my rankings?

[Itanium]

I believe that the domain itself had a score that has been distributed so far to around 3,000 pages.

I agree with this and suspect google using an overall quality score for some time now. Also, depending on how you site is build, pagerank flow might be completely different now.

However, unfortunately you can never know what the real cause for problems is. If I were you, I'd sit it out at least for 2-3 weeks and see what happends. I have changed quite a few things on my site the last couple of weeks and I'm seeing weird ranking and traffic jumps and drops, both in google ranking and in google analytics.

[not2easy]

I would not either remove or noindex the new pages. If you check to see the date of the last sitemap, you may see it is time to resubmit and include the new pages. It may take some time to even out changes as Itanium suggests, especially with multiple changes.

Another suggestion is to go to the GSC (old GWT) and use the "Fetch as Google" with some new (and old) URLs to be sure that the resources can be crawled. It will show you how your pages are seen on desktop and mobile and tell you if there are resources blocked that would help them to render the page completely as a visitor would see it. If they can't render a page it doesn't help it get positioned/ranked the way it could be.

Edited to add:

I believe that the domain itself had a score that has been distributed so far to around 3,000 pages. When we added 9,000 additional pages, the same score has been distributed to 12,000 pages.

It may possibly apply initially, I don't know, but IMO this would only remain true if all the new pages had no additional content.

[zoltan]

All the new pages have content, however, if we assume the quality of the initial pages were 100%, maybe the quality of the 9,000 new pages is 70-80%. The content is quite similar, it just refers to different locations. For example: widget content from Canada and US was the main location of the 3,000 pages and now, the main location of the majority of widget pages is Spain, France and Italy.

[not2easy]

That is several changes to add at one time, for sure. Are the European pages in other languages or is the content targeted to the same visitors as the existing visitors? What I mean is something on the order of "Widgets" on the existing pages and "Widgets found in France" on the new pages (for example) or is it more like "Widgets for sale here" on the old pages and "Widgets to order if you live in France" meaning that the new pages might have a separate language and be targeted to people in France or Spain, etc.?

If the new pages are translations offered to people in other locations, then you should work on the meta lang tags and set a canonical to de-duplicate. Google uses meta tags rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to show language relevant results. You can read more here: [support.google.com...]

[londrum]

I had the exact same situation as the OP, except i added many more pages. Suffered the same drop in rankings. I ended up removing the vast majority of the pages and it slowly recovered.

I agree with your page rank idea. I dont think you get punished for adding the pages themselves (unless they are lousy pages, of course), but i do I think that by adding so many pages you dilute the juice that google gives to all the others, hence the drop.

I also think that i diluted the "theme" of my site. It was originally about one subject, and i expanded it to cover other subjects, and maybe google then didnt regard my site as such a slam-dunk for the original subject

[aakk9999]

I also think that i diluted the "theme" of my site.

Very important thing and yet often forgotten! Lesson: don't confuse Google in what the site is about!

[Walt Hartwell]

My first reaction is that adding 9,000 pages to a 3,000 page site is probably not the best idea. If the original site content was widgets from US and Canada, I'd want to fold in Spain or France or Italy (just one) and adjust to where you get the response you desire. Then add 1 more country with the same format and finally the last country.

aakk9999's comment deserves some thought. Small steps are usually better than great leaps. Or, if not better, at least more easily understood.

[zoltan]

Thanks for all your comments.
We have removed the pages from site and sitemap, let's hope soon we will start to see some recovery.

[zoltan]

Another update here.
All the pages where we went from traditional design to responsive design completely disappeared from search results.
The look and feel of the pages on desktop is almost the same as it was, the only change is that these pages are now working on mobile devices.

So, it looks like the big problem is that we moved from non responsive design to responsive design. I am not sure what should we do now....

[londrum]

Sit it out. If you think the pages are better then I would definitely just leave them, and wait for them to recover

[zoltan]

Thanks.
On the other hand, we have noticed something else. With the new changes to responsive design, we noticed that the PageSpeed Insights went down on desktop from 80+ score to 20-30 score. So, although we made the pages responsive, it looks like the PageSpeed measured by google drastically dropped.
We have now corrected several errors and the PageSpeed is the same or even better than it was with the non responsive design. Let's see what will be the result. :)

But according to these experiments, it really looks like PageSpeed is a very important factor of ranking. Much more important than I previously thought.

[Itanium]

I don't think the Pagespeed score is relevant. It sounds more like you changed quite a few things with the HTML-code and Google is now reassessing your site. Going responsive should be a matter of adding a couple of dozen css lines. That alone won't affect your Desktop-Pagespeed score.

[zoltan]

It affected mainly because the way the images were presented.