Google keeps removing pages from my website!

[travel curious]

I have about 100 pages in my website, I went from a high of 85 in google's index in October now down to about 49.

I don't have any manual actions or security issues showing up in google search console. I think my content is right up there for my subject matter as good or better than most other similar content sites.

I've got to be missing something simple, any ideas?

[beaverman]

When has it began? If on 19-21st October, you might have been hit by the Spam Update.

Also, how do you check it? In GSC or via the 'site:' operator in search?

[travel curious]

Looks like on 0ct 15th 2022 it went from 87 to 85 pages indexed and has slowly dropped since then to 49 pages.

This is through GSC.

Can you post site names here?

When I do a google "Site:" search and the name not a single page shows up.

My website name is 2 words separated by a "-", another site with the same name but just the two words no hypen shows up when I do a "Site:" search for my site.

[beaverman]

To check in search, also try 'site:https://...', with your protocol instead of a naked domain.

If you still get nothing or close to nothing, may as well be a penalty or smth very wrong with indexing. How old is your website? Have you had search traffic, has it declined?

[travel curious]

Registered it June I think didn't do anything with it until maybe Aug

If I type into google my website name in the results I see the index page listed as "https://WEBSITE NAME"

If I type into google "Site:" plus exactly what shows up for my index page, nothing shows up

[not2easy]

The search operators can be tricky. Using the site: search operator with https:// and a domain name, it will only show you a list of URLs for that domain name that are using https:. It may or may not include all URLs.

Google's instructions tell us to use

site:example.com

exactly as shown. If a domain name is example-widget.com you would use the hyphen for the site: operator. If you type in something in Google search not using a search operator such as site: then whatever you get is what Google thinks you want to find.

See Google's How-to here: [developers.google.com...]

[travel curious]

Kind of back to the original issue, can't undestand why google is slowing deindexing my site, any ideas to start with?

[tangor]

@travel curious .... welcome to Webmasterworld!

If your site is that new g might not have had time to percolate and may be adjusting/indexing things. Give it a few more months. The web is fast, but it isn't THAT fast and g, these days, seems to be taking sweet time to get things done.

Meanwhile, if you are chasing/seeking ranking and constantly changing the pages, STOP! Let g see what you have, else you are seen as volatile (ever changing) and they won't know where to put you.