Sudden drop in index, is this a bug?
-
We haven't made any sort of changes to the website recently and we had a 10% drop in indexed pages. I know there is rumors of a bug, has this happened to anyone else?
-
Good point. Sorry, I didn't realize the statement was specifically about the Sitemap feature. However, it's not unlikely that both issues were related.
-
Just saw this https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-index-status-count-drop-20813.html it is a bug.
-
I saw that but that is for the sitemap index, is that considered the same as total amount of indexed pages?
-
Hi,
I have not seen anything in any of my properties so far but it is definitely more than a rumor; Webmaster Trends Analyst from Google confirmed via Twitter:
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(
Hello, I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either. Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada). My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41). I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer) The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
What would cause my structured data items to drop off?
I have about 20,000 items on my Magento Site. I used a plugin to add structured data. If I use the Webmaster Tools Structured Data Tester everything shows up perfect. There are no errors on any page that I have spot checked. My total items increased to about 2500, but has now started dropping. The numbers have dropped to about 725 over the last few weeks. What can I check?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Old pages STILL indexed...
Our new website has been live for around 3 months and the URL structure has completely changed. We weren't able to dynamically create 301 redirects for over 5,000 of our products because of how different the URL's were so we've been redirecting them as and when. 3 months on and we're still getting hundreds of 404 errors daily in our Webmaster Tools account. I've checked the server logs and it looks like Bing Bot still seems to want to crawl our old /product/ URL's. Also, if I perform a "site:example.co.uk/product" on Google or Bing - lots of results are still returned, indicating the both still haven't dropped them from their index. Should I ignore the 404 errors and continue to wait for them to drop off or should I just block /product/ in my robots.txt? After 3 months I'd have thought they'd have naturally dropped off by now! I'm half-debating this: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur
Disallow: /some-directory-for-all/* User-agent: Bingbot
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /product/ Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml0 -
Why are some pages indexed but not cached by Google?
The question is simple but I don't understand the answer. I found a webpage that was linking to my personal site. The page was indexed in Google. However, there was no cache option and I received a 404 from Google when I tried using cache:www.thewebpage.com/link/. What exactly does this mean? Also, does it have any negative implication on the SEO value of the link that points to my personal website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mRELEVANCE0 -
Certain Pages Not Being Indexed - Please Help
We are having trouble getting a bulk of our pages indexed in google. Any help would be greatly appreciated! The Following Page types are being indexed through escaped fragment: http://www.cbuy.tv/#! http://www.cbuy.tv/celebrity#!65-Ashley-Tisdale/fashion/4097-Casadei-BLADE-PUMP/Product/175199 <cite>www.cbuy.tv/celebrity/155-Sophia-Bush#!</cite> However, all our pages that look like this, are not being indexed: http://www.cbuy.tv/#!Type=Photo&id=b1d18759-5e52-4a1c-9491-6fb3cb9d4b95&Katie-Holmes-Hot-Pink-Pants-Isabel-Marant-DAVID-DOUBLE-BREASTED-Wool-COAT-Maison-Pumps-Black-Bag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CBuy0 -
Why are Pages returning 404 errors not being dropped?
Our webmaster tools continues to return anywhere upwards of 750 pages that have 404 errors. These are from pages of a previous site no longer used. However this was over 1 year ago these pages were dropped along with the 301 re-directs. Why is Google not clearing these from webmaster tools but re-listing them again after 3 month cycle? Is it because external sites have links to these pages? If so should I put a 301 in place (most of these site are forums and potentially dodgy directories etc from previous poor link building programs) or ask for a manual removal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0