Google Index Constantly Decreases Week over Week (for over 1 year now)
-
Hi,
I recently started working with two products (one is community driven content), the other is editorial content, but I've seen a strange pattern in both of them.
The Google Index constantly decreases week over week, for at least 1 year. Yes, the decrease increased when the new Mobile version of Google came out, but it was still declining before that.
Has it ever happened to you? How did you find out what was wrong? How did you solve it?
What I want to do is take the sitemap and look for the urls in the index, to first determine which are the missing links. The problem though is that the sitemap is huge (6 M pages). Have you find out a solution on how to deal with such big index changes?
Cheers,
Andrei
-
Thanks EGOL. Makes sense.
-
My response to this is to build small, compact websites where multiple related items are sold on the same page.
If products are grouped wisely by keywords, you can still have a broad keyword reach from a smaller site. Those longer pages have more words, more images, more buy buttons and are respected better by Google. Thus they rank better than short skimply pages.
Big websites that struggle to hold pages in the index do not compete well.
A smaller site does not spread your power out amongst a large number of pages. The smaller the site the more competitive it will be against other larger websites of similar total linkstrength and authority.
-
Thanks EGOL for explaining. It makes sense. So Google discovers the urls via sitemap / internal link structure but then forgets about them because nobody reminds Google of them by linking to them.
I do understand that this is a common problem, so what set of tactics has worked so far for you in solving it?
-
If you have a website with six million pages, you will need a lot of inbound links to get all of those pages in to the index and held there. When Google discovers your pages they will index them but if spiders do not revisit again, google will forget them.
For a website to hold six million pages in the index, it would need hundreds of powerful inbound links to thousands of average inbound links from other websites to deliver enough spider action. These links must be permanent to maintain a flow of spiders into the website. If they are temporarily applied the flow of spiders will be cut off and google will forget about those pages.
Also needed would be a good linkage structure that channels the spiders deep into those millions of pages so that they will be forced to chew their way out through other pages.
Weak websites with too many pages are a common problem.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
No images in Google index
No images are indexed on this site (client of ours): http://www.rubbermagazijn.nl/. We've tried everything (descriptive alt texts, image sitemaps, fetch&render, check robots) but a site:www.rubbermagazijn.nl shows 0 image results and the sitemap report in Search Console shows 0 images indexed. We're not sure how to proceed from here. Is there anyone with an idea what the problem could be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Removing Parameterized URLs from Google Index
We have duplicate eCommerce websites, and we are in the process of implementing cross-domain canonicals. (We can't 301 - both sites are major brands). So far, this is working well - rankings are improving dramatically in most cases. However, what we are seeing in some cases is that Google has indexed a parameterized page for the site being canonicaled (this is the site that is getting the canonical tag - the "from" page). When this happens, both sites are being ranked, and the parameterized page appears to be blocking the canonical. The question is, how do I remove canonicaled pages from Google's index? If Google doesn't crawl the page in question, it never sees the canonical tag, and we still have duplicate content. Example: A. www.domain2.com/productname.cfm%3FclickSource%3DXSELL_PR is ranked at #35, and B. www.domain1.com/productname.cfm is ranked at #12. (yes, I know that upper case is bad. We fixed that too.) Page A has the canonical tag, but page B's rank didn't improve. I know that there are no guarantees that it will improve, but I am seeing a pattern. Page A appears to be preventing Google from passing link juice via canonical. If Google doesn't crawl Page A, it can't see the rel=canonical tag. We likely have thousands of pages like this. Any ideas? Does it make sense to block the "clicksource" parameter in GWT? That kind of scares me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Wordpress blog in a subdirectory not being indexed by Google
HI MozzersIn my websites sitemap.xml, pages are listed, such as /blog/ and /blog/textile-fact-or-fiction-egyptian-cotton-explained/These pages are visible when you visit them in a browser and when you use the Google Webmaster tool - Fetch as Google to view them (see attachment), however they aren't being indexed in Google, not even the root directory for the blog (/blog/) is being indexed, and when we query:site: www.hilden.co.uk/blog/ It returns 0 results in Google.Also note that:The Wordpress installation is located at /blog/ which is a subdirectory of the main root directory which is managed by Magento. I'm wondering if this causing the problem.Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!AnthonyToTOHuj.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
If I had an issue with a friendly URL module and I lost all my rankings. Will they return now that issue is resolved next time I'm crawled by google?
I have 'magic seo urls' installed on my zencart site. Except for some reason no one can explain why or how the files were disabled. So my static links went back to dynamic (index.php?**********) etc. The issue was resolved with the module except in that time google must have crawled my site and I lost all my rankings. I'm nowher to be found in the top 50. Did this really cause such an extravagant SEO issue as my web developers told me? Can I expect my rankings to return next time my site is crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pete790 -
Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
Hi, I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do... For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'. Do you think this is right? Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled? Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0