Google Webmaster Tools -> Sitemap suddent "indexed" drop
-
Hello MOZ,
We had an massive SEO drop in June due to unknown reasons and we have been trying to recover since then.
I've just noticed this yesterday and I'm worried. See: http://imgur.com/xv2QgCQ
Could anyone help by explaining what would cause this sudden drop and what does this drop translates to exactly?
What is strange is that our index status is still strong at 310 pages, no drop there: http://imgur.com/a1sRAKo
And when I do search on google site:globecar.com everything seems normal see: http://imgur.com/O7vPkqu
Thanks,
-
I found the problem guys, I had made a change in the sitemap that messed up everything. It's all back to normal now. Thanks guys for your support!
-
That is what I was looking for, thank you.
-
I think this is the information everyone is looking for, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemap-index-count-drop-is-a-bug-20608.html It seems there is a bug in GWT with sitemaps.
-
I am having this exact problem, it started on July 14th. For some reason my indexed has dropped even though I have no sitemap errors. Have you received any answers?
-
Totally agree with Andy.
Make sure your XML sitemaps don't contain any errors, and if something like this happens you should closely watch your organic traffic as well. If there's a big drop in your organic traffic you can start worrying
-
That isn't an 'SEO' drop as such, this is related to your sitemap errors. Doing a site: wont show the same numbers as you see as being shown on the sitemap itself.
Rebuild your sitemap, correct the errors and then see what state it is in.
-Andy
-
Hey,
First of all you don't need to worry about. Be calm and find out the root cause.
Usually when this happen, we investigate things in bit depth. I can't give you the accurate answer before seeing the details. Please checkout the below pointers and let us know your thoughts.
- Your marketing activities followed the same pace? May be, your competitors outranked you by producing more valuable links and pages.
- Did you check the analytics? It'd be better for us if you could share the analytics traffic graph.
- Have you done any major changes to your website in terms of design, technical things, content, URLs, shift to another platform etc?
- Have you just recovered from any penalty in recent past? Check your WMT again.
- Did you agency/team build new links in this time period? If yes, examine them.
Find out the best possible answer of above points and I'm sure you will get the clearer picture of this mishap.
Hope this helps!
Umar
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
-
Why isn't Google indexing this site?
Hello, Moz Community My client's site hasn't been indexed by Google, although it was launched a couple of months ago. I've ran down the check points in this article https://moz.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed without finding a reason why. Any sharp SEO-eyes out there who can spot this quickly? The url is: http://www.oldermann.no/ Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
INEVO, digital agency0 -
Drop in Indexed pages
Hope everyone is having an Awesome December! I first noticed a drop in my index in the beginnings of November. My site drop in indexed pages from 1400 to 600 in the past 3-4 weeks. I don't know the cause of it, and would like the community to help me figure out why my indexing has dropped. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BSC0 -
The "webmaster" disallowed all ROBOTS to fight spam! Help!!
One of the companies I do work for has a magento site. I am simply the SEO guy and they work the website through some developers who hold access to their systems VERY tightly. Using Google Webmaster Tools I saw that the robots.txt file was blocking ALL robots. I immediately e-mailed out and received a long reply about foreign robots and scrappers slowing down the website. They told me I would have to provide a list of only the good robots to allow in robots.txt. Please correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't Robots.txt optional?? Won't a bad scrapper or bot still bog down the site? Shouldn't that be handled in httaccess or something different? I'm not new to SEO but I'm sure some of you who have been around longer have run into something like this and could provide some suggestions or resources I could use to plead my case! If I'm wrong.. please help me understand how we can meet both needs of allowing bots to visit the site but prevent the 'bad' ones. Their claim is the site is bombarded by tons and tons of bots that have slowed down performance. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoshuaLindley0 -
Total Indexed 1.5M vs 83k submitted by sitemap. What?
We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap. The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate) In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million. With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot? I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninjaz0 -
Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
Webmaster Tools Internal Links
Hi all, I have around 400 links in the navigation menu (site-wide) and when I use webmaster tools to check for internal links to each page; some have as many as 250K and some as little as 200. Shouldn't the number of internal links for pages found in the navigation menu be relatively the same? Or is Google registering more internal links for pages linked closer to the top of the code Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
How are pages ranked when using Google's "site:" operator?
Hi, If you perform a Google search like site:seomoz.org, how are the pages displayed sorted/ranked? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0