Massive jump in pages indexed (and I do mean massive)

[Lina-iWeb]

Hello mozzers,

I have been working in SEO for a number of years but never seen anything like a jump in pages indexed of this proportion (image is from the Index Status report in Google Webmaster Tools: http://i.imgur.com/79mW6Jl.png

Has anyone has ever seen anything like this?
Anyone have an idea about what happened?

One thing that sprung to mind might be that the same pages are now getting indexed in several more google country sites (e.g. google.ca, google.co.uk, google.es, google.com.mx) but I don't know if the Index Status report in WMT works like that.

A few notes to explain the context:

• It's an eCommerce website with service pages and around 9 different pages listing products.
• The site is small - only around 100 pages across three languages
• 1.5 months ago we migrated from three language subdomains to a single sub-domain with language directories. Before and after the migration I used hreflang tags across the board. We saw about 50% uplift in traffic from unbranded organic terms after the migration (although on day one it was more like +300%), especially from more language diversity.
• I had an issue where the 'sort' links on the product tables were giving rise to thousands of pages of duplicate content, although I had used the URL parameter handling to communicate to Google that these were not significantly different and only to index the representative URL. About 2 weeks ago I blocked them using the robots.txt (Disallow: *?sort). I never felt these were doing us too much harm in reality although many of them are indexed and can be found with a site:xxx.com search.
• At the same time as adding *?sort to the robots.txt, I made an hreflang sitemap for each language, and linked to them from an index sitemap and added these to WMT. I added some country specific alternate URLs as well as language just to see if I started getting more traffic from those countries (e.g. xxx.com/es/ for Spanish, xxx.com/es/ for Spain, xxx.xom/es/ for Mexico etc). I dodn't seem to get any benefit from this.
• Webmaster tools profile is for a URL that is the root domain xxx.com. We have a lot of other subdomains, including a blog that is far bigger than our main site. But looking at the Search Queries report, all the pages listed are on the core website so I don't think it is the blog pages etc.
• I have seen a couple of good days in terms of unbranded organic search referrals - no spike or drop off but a couple of good days in keeping with recent improvements in these kinds of referrals.
• We have some software mirror sub domains that are duplicated across two website: xxx.mirror.xxx.com and xxx.mirror.xxx.ca. Many of these don't even have sections and Google seemed to be handling the duplication, always preferring to show the .com URL despite no cross-site canonicals in place.

Very interesting, I'm sure you will agree!

THANKS FOR READING!

79mW6Jl.png

[Lina-iWeb]

Thanks for your considered response Adam. It is indeed quite possible that the jump is the non-English pages suddenly being indexed/reported as indexed in this WMT account. If there was to be a 'switch over' of the pages from one sub domain to the root domain, we would indeed have expected to see a jump like that.

It does still seem odd that (1) it came a long time after the migration and (2) the impressions and clicks (as reported in WMT) have not seen a similar jump, neither when the migration took place or in the last week. The 50% increase in clicks from unbranded organic I mentioned was a genuine increase, as our Analytics previously covered all three language sub-domains anyway.

On a side note, regarding the seperate subdomains, I was quite surprised to see how well the hreflang tags worked across sub domains before the migration. It was arguably better handled by Google before the migration to a single domain (more/better sitelinks for branded searches anyway). I think a lot of our uplift in clicks came from new pages and better on site optimization, and that the effect of consolidating the domains was not actually that big (in terms of clicks from unbranded organic). I think that the subdomain/directory debate is not quite as cut and dried as people think.

I must say, I love the hreflang tags - they are one of the most underrated tools in SEO in my opinion. Just don't forget that canonical tag or they don't work!

Thanks again for your reply!

[Adam_Cochran]

Due to the information we have this response is obviously going to be some educated speculation. You said 1.5 months ago that you changed the structure in how you present your language options to the user and I think this has a great deal to do with the index pages your seeing.

If you check out Rand's SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) from slides 39-47 you'll see his discussion on the importance of site structure in the eyes of Google. While translated content may be all the same to the user, the search engines take the structure to mean different matters of intent.

For example, sub-domain information is often taken to be duplicated translate purpose only content. It's also often categorized as a separate site.

When you went from sub-domains to language directories you went from three separate sites to one site with flow-down accessible information. In Google's eyes you just expanded your website with new fresh and valuable information. While some of the indexed pages may drop off I think this structural change is the main reason you've had such a pick up in indexing and hopefully it plays well for your on your international SEO campaign!

Cheers,
Adam