My indexed pages count is shrinking in webmaster tools. Is this normal ?
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I noticed that our total # of indexed pages dropped recently by a substantial amount (see chart below)
Is this normal?
Also, 3 weeks after this started dropping, we got a message on increased # of crawl errors and found that a site update was causing 300+ new 404s.
could this be related ?
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In Google Webmaster tools you can use the remove button or click the little icon and total. I would definitely say there is a correlation with 404's and losing pages to the Google index. As Google does not index 404's
You have nine things being blocked by robot text go to the robots.txt file in Google Webmaster tools and find out there if there's an issue and you're blocking some of your website to Google
You can also use this tool to tell you exactly what your Google robots.txt file looks like right now and compared to any changes being made is very valuable tool
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
I hope I've been of help sincerely,
Thomas
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