Indexed pages keep dropping in GSC

[Manson0711]

Hi there,

since june 4th my indexed pages have dropped by 50%. Ive no explaination for that. I dont have thin content, nor bad links or duplicated content. Is there any chance to discover which pages were kicked out of the index to get a clue what happened?

Thanks for your help.

Regards
Manson

[martinibuster]

How many pages do you have in total?

[seoskunk]

Yep noticing this too

[seoskunk]

Actually I have a bit more info on this, can you check please Manson0711 for possible canonical links

Things like
www.example.com/page-that-has-been-dropped
Resides to with a 301
www.example.com/page-that-has-been-dropped/

Note the slash, thanks in advance

[Manson0711]

In total I had 12k indexed til June 6th, then lost 2k on a drop, then another 1k on June 25th, then a bigger drop July 2nd down to 6k.

@seoskunk: I indeed did some changes regarding slashes at the end of my URLs. Im pointing canonicals from the URLs without to the URLs with slashes since i has DC issues.

example:

www.example.com/page
rel=canonical to
www.example.com/page/

[lucy24]

One thing is missing from the narrative: How many pages does your site actually have? If there were millions of pages, you could be forgiven for misplacing a million or two. But either you really have 12,000 pages or you don't.

Make that two things missing. The second is How many URLs does your site have? You did say at the outset that you don't have duplicate content. So the two numbers should be the same. Are they? For example, given /pagename and /pagename/ does one of the two redirect to the other?

[Manson0711]

Sorry for the the missing information.

The site has around 800k pages. Most of them are filter combinations and URLs with parameter. The filter URLs are noindex. The parameter URLs are canonicalized to the base URL. Indexable pages are 60k.

When I said I have no duplicate content I meant that I took care of it already. At least I hope so. The "/" and no "/" URLs were the latest urls I fixed.that was on may 25th.

Weird thing is that it seems that some of the parameter URLs are indexed even if canonicalized. Also a couple of hundreds filter URLs made there way in the index besides noindex tag.

[lucy24]

Urk, then we need the other question. How many pages has Google been crawling? GSC will give you some information, but the only absolutely reliable information source is your raw access logs. Are all of your 8 lakhs of pages reachable by directly following links, or do many of them involve humans putting in search criteria? If some things require javascript, has the googlebot been crawling your scripts?

Also a couple of hundreds filter URLs made there way in the index besides noindex tag.

Hmm. Do these noindex pages have indexed (or indexable) analogues, probably involving a different set of parameters? Have those indexable versions been crawled, and if so, are they indexed? I assume you've checked a few random pages "live" to verify that the noindex tag is where it's supposed to be.

General query for people with very, very large sites: It's understood that Google may not index absolutely everything. (Coulda fooled me, based on things I find in searches.) But do they crawl everything? Do they make up parameters in the way that they make up html pagenames ("rdmtnvbyjvhgrd.html" and so on)?

[Totalx]

800k?

Sounds like spam to be honest. What do you expect?

[Manson0711]

as mentioned the 800k pages are the result of a whole lot of filter combinations and parameters. its an online shop. so no spam.

Google crawls approx 20k a day (GSC)

@lucy24: the parameter URLs that are getting indexed are product pages with EAN parameters. Somehow the canonicals are not recongnized for some pages.

[tapioca]

I am also having the same issue. It dropped from 290K to mere 50K in recent 3 months. It happened to two of my sites, one of which is a Wordpress site which hasn't changed.

I am not clear about the canonical issue. My site pages are set up as www.example.com/company/companyname However, in my sitemap,it was created as www.example.com/company/companyname/ Will this cause an issue?

[lucy24]

Will this cause an issue?

Possibly, but your description doesn't give enough information. Are we dealing with Duplicate Content (each page is accessible both with and without final / slash) or is it a question of Imperfect Technical Quality (internal links and/or sitemap consistently lead to a redirect)?

[sureshchowhan]

I was tracking my indexed pages in GSRP, and found a sudden huge drop in index pages. There were about 300K pages were indexed but last day I checked and found that its only 80k now. I was tracking for competitors index as well they have also dropped with around 50% drop in index.

Do someone else suffer this issue? If any clue about this issue, please share.

[edited by: goodroi at 1:23 pm (utc) on Jul 19, 2017]
[edit reason] thread formatting [/edit]

[Writerly]

If you haven't used any black-hat SEO strategies, one problem could be the freshness or the size of your pages.
Make sure to check the Crawl Rate ( the time it acquires to crawl sitemap and begins to decrease the number of indexed pages) and check if your robots.txt file isn't blocking something.