Sudden Drop in Index Status on GSC
-
Hi all,
We've seen a sudden drop in index status on GSC from 19,000 to 12,000.
Rankings, referring domains, organic traffic etc. have not changed. However, we have implemented a huge number of redirects and done a site migration from http to https in the past year. Could this have an effect?
Thanks!
-
We have seen huge drops like that in the past. In our case, the new number seemed more accurate (what I would expect) - and I put it down to having implemented canonicals, pagination etc. which would have brought down the number of duplicate pages indexed.
If you haven't seen a drop in traffic I wouldn't be too worried.
-
Hi
19,000 seems like a lot of pages. I'd first ask yourself the question whether it is right to have so many pages in SERPS. Have you written or generated sufficiently engaging content and correct META for all of those pages?
Check the robots.txt file for any errors to see if you are excluding directories that you shouldn't be. For sure do a full site crawl to see if you need to canonicalise, no index or redirect any further pages that may be skinny, weak content (or special content e.g. catalog searches, account pages.).
1 page = 1 tight group of contextually similar keywords
I'd be more worries about organic visits that number of pages indexed. I seem to spend most of my life reducing page count !
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi,
It's possible that the site migration could have had an impact on the index. Did you notice the drop in the indexed pages immediately after the migration or just recently uncovered it? You can use Screaming Frog to perform a manual index to check on the total number of indexed pages and compare it to GSC to ensure it's accurate.
Alternatively, perform a 'Fetch as Google', followed by 'Index' to perform a manual index in GSC to check if there's any indexing issues.
Hope this helps!
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
-
GSC problem: how to solve?
Hi all, Google Search Console gives me an error on these pages: info:https://www.varamedia.be/?utm_content=bufferbaaa4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer info:https://www.varamedia.be/?utm_content=bufferece3f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer I see there's an UTM tracking in the URL from Google+. We do have an account there but I don't see how this might give an error. Is this hurting our ranking score? How can we solve this?
Reporting & Analytics | | Varamedia0 -
How do you analyze a traffic drop with no historic Google Analytics data?
A client of mine has a large website with multiple sections (shop, forums, articles, etc.) that apparently had a significant reduction in rankings, traffic, and sales in the past. However, historic Google Analytics data is not available for the site, and I'm having troubles identifying anything concrete about the traffic drop, such as when it happened, what pages/sections it happened to, etc. The shop traffic drives most of the revenue, but it's a small number compared to the forums traffic, so it's hard to pick anything out of top-line trends like SEMrush offers. What tools or strategies might help in this situation?
Reporting & Analytics | | AdamThompson0 -
Increase in Direct traffic, drop in Google traffic, after updating Google Analytics settings.
I made some changes to our Google Analytics property settings (see notes in screenshot). As a result, there was an equal drop in Google traffic and increase in Direct traffic. Has anyone else seen something like this before? I'm wondering if I should revert. jE7buO6
Reporting & Analytics | | vcj0 -
Moz Crawler suddenly reporting 1000s of duplicates (BE.net)
In the last 3-4 days we've had several thousand 'duplicate content' warnings appear in our crawl report, 99% of them related to our on-site blog. The blog is BlogEngine.Net, but the pages simply don't exist. The majority seem to be Roger trying quasi-random URLs like:
Reporting & Analytics | | Progauto
/?page=410 /?page=151 Etc. etc. The blog will present content for these requests, but it is of course the same empty page since there's only unique content for up to /?Page=10 or so. Two questions: 1. Did something change recently? These blogs have been up for months, and this problem has only come up this week. Did Roger change to become more aggressive lately? 2. Suggested remediation? On one of the blogs I've put no-index no-follow for any page that has a /?page querystring, and we'll see what effect that has come next crawl next week. However, I'm not sure this will work as per: http://moz.com/community/q/functionality-of-seomoz-crawl-page-reports Anyone else had dynamic blogs suddenly blossom into thousands of duplicate content warnings? Google (rightly) ignores these pages completely.0 -
Show item status in GA - LIve vs sold vs unsold
Hi guys, I am working with SEO for an auction site with B2C and C2C. (similar to eBay) All item\products on our page have an unique url. The auction can last from hours to weeks.
Reporting & Analytics | | helgeolaussen
When the item is live, sold or (finished but)unsold it still has the same url.
So when I take a look at SEO traffic to items in Google Analytics, I can't tell if the item was live, sold or unsold at the time the user landed on the page. Which makes it diffucult to analyse the traffic. Is there anyway I can make GA show the status of the item for the time user landed on it? Best regards, Ceran0 -
Search Traffic Drops Before It Improves?
I'm working on a site with tons of great, useful content....the owners of the site implemented a new site layout and design (complete overhaul) and they were lacking basics such as meta descriptions, 301 redirects, and, shockingly, they had the same Title tag for every single page on a site with thousands of unique how-to articles. Unsurprisingly their traffic dropped by about 300%. They generate most of their traffic from people learning how to build stairs, how to install crown molding, and other related matters. Beginning last Thursday I've been performing basic on-site SEO, things like having unique titles for each page and similar tasks. The week from Thursday when I began until yesterday (Wednesday), Google traffic dropped -29.73% - 17,715 vs 25,210 I believe this is a normal part of the "Google Shuffle" -- does anyone have a Matt Cutts link or similar proof that this is a normal part of the process?
Reporting & Analytics | | wattssw0 -
Correlation between google and yahoo indexed pages
My blog ocpatentlawyer.com has about 130 pages or so. Google has indexed most if not all of the posts and pages. In contrast, yahoo has only indexed about 1/4 of the pages and posts. Are there any actions that can be taken based on this information? For example, if i prepare a blog post should I prepare it so that it will most likely be indexed into yahoo knowing that google will also index it. If so, how can i prepare blog posts that will most likely be indexed into yahoo's index?
Reporting & Analytics | | jamesjd70 -
Google: show all images indexed on a domain
Is there a way to display all images that google has indexed on a domain / subdomain? I'm basically looking for something like a site:-command for google image search.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0