Indexed # of pages slowly dropping day by day.

[westcoast]

This is a little weird. Our site is extremely old (20+ years) and our sitemap coverage was always very good. We were at 95% indexed.

However, for the past few months we are losing indexed pages from our sitemap... a small number each and every day. The weirdest part is that it appears to be site-wide. A small number of pages from multiple sections of the site drop daily.

Does anyone know what might have changed over the last 6 months or so that may have caused this? Any idea why Google is suddenly deeming that pages on our site shouldn't be in the index after being happy with them for decades?

Note that the pages getting dropped are the canonical forms and do not have alternate indexed versions.

[goodroi]

I am seeing widespread pruning of pages across various industries. Usually these are not landing pages generating traffic from Google. Some of these sites are having an increase of Google traffic while seeing their indexed counts decrease.

I'd suggest you start with double checking your inbound referring backlinks. Then double check the mobile version of your internal nav links. Then look at the content of the pages. Are they really fresh & unique?