Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Why google indexed pages are decreasing?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Why google indexed pages are decreasing?

    Technical SEO
    2
    2
    5095
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • SierraPCB
      SierraPCB Subscriber last edited by

      Hi,

      my website had around 400 pages indexed  but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that?  will it effect my web page ranking ?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Davinia22
        Davinia22 Subscriber last edited by

        Hi -

        A good question to ask is do you have 400 pages that are relevant, up-to-date and useful to visitors. If you have duplicate content, empty pages and so on a decrease in indexed pages is not necessarily a bad thing. You don't want your SEO efforts diluted across multiple pages when there is only one best page and you don't want your visitors to go to a bad/old page because this would be a poor user experience for them.

        My first check would be to look at your XML sitemap. If you don't have one start there (be sure to upload to Google Webmaster Tools). If you do have one check there are no issues (in Google Webmaster Tools) and also have a manual check to ensure that it is using correct tags, indexed all of your pages etc.

        Also have a look at your robots.txt file - have you made any changes lately? Blocked sections from being accessed?

        Content - do you have lots of pages with similar content. If so you should use rel-canonical tags so that search engines know which page should be indexed.

        Find the true amount of webpages you have (and want indexed), tidy up the what and how pages get indexed and then use that number as your benchmark for amount of pages indexed.

        Hope that helps,Davinia

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • 1 / 1
        • First post
          Last post

        Got a burning SEO question?

        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


        Start my free trial


        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.

        • See all categories

        Related Questions

        • Ginovdw

          Keywords are indexed on the home page

          indexation keyword rankings

          Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.

          Technical SEO | | Ginovdw
          1
        • yoursearchteam

          How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED

          We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google.  See the screenshot for an example.  The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index.  Are there extra steps we should take?  So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map. ^802D799E5372F02797BE19290D8987F3E248DCA6656F8D9BF6^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr.png

          Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam
          0
        • iragless

          How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.

          Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google).  Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total).  These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings?  Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them.  Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google?  Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian

          Technical SEO | | iragless
          0
        • WebServiceConsulting.com

          Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?

          If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....

          Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com
          0
        • rhoadesjohn

          How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages

          We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th.  It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?

          Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn
          0
        • priceseo

          How to determine which pages are not indexed

          Is there a way to determine which pages of a website are not being indexed by the search engines? I know Google Webmasters has a sitemap area where it tells you how many urls have been submitted and how many are indexed out of those submitted. However, it doesn't necessarily show which urls aren't being indexed.

          Technical SEO | | priceseo
          1
        • Ideas-Money-Art

          How long does it take for Google for deindexing pages?

          Hi mozzers, We just launched a mobile website(parallel) and realized that it created many duplicate content with desktop URLs. I decided to add name="robots" content="No index, No follow" /> to the entire mobile site. My only concern is that I am still seeing the mobile site indexed when it's been almost a week I added these tags. Does anyone know how long it takes google to deindex your content? Thanks

          Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
          0
        • DarwinChinaSEO

          Why google index my IP URL

          hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson

          Technical SEO | | DarwinChinaSEO
          0

        Get started with Moz Pro!

        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

        Start my free trial
        Products
        • Moz Pro
        • Moz Local
        • Moz API
        • Moz Data
        • STAT
        • Product Updates
        Moz Solutions
        • SMB Solutions
        • Agency Solutions
        • Enterprise Solutions
        • Digital Marketers
        Free SEO Tools
        • Domain Authority Checker
        • Link Explorer
        • Keyword Explorer
        • Competitive Research
        • Brand Authority Checker
        • Local Citation Checker
        • MozBar Extension
        • MozCast
        Resources
        • Blog
        • SEO Learning Center
        • Help Hub
        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
        • How-to Guides
        • Moz Academy
        • API Docs
        About Moz
        • About
        • Team
        • Careers
        • Contact
        Why Moz
        • Case Studies
        • Testimonials
        Get Involved
        • Become an Affiliate
        • MozCon
        • Webinars
        • Practical Marketer Series
        • MozPod
        Connect with us

        Contact the Help team

        Join our newsletter
        Moz logo
        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
        • Accessibility
        • Terms of Use
        • Privacy

        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.