Google Index Constantly Decreases Week over Week (for over 1 year now)
-
Hi,
I recently started working with two products (one is community driven content), the other is editorial content, but I've seen a strange pattern in both of them.
The Google Index constantly decreases week over week, for at least 1 year. Yes, the decrease increased when the new Mobile version of Google came out, but it was still declining before that.
Has it ever happened to you? How did you find out what was wrong? How did you solve it?
What I want to do is take the sitemap and look for the urls in the index, to first determine which are the missing links. The problem though is that the sitemap is huge (6 M pages). Have you find out a solution on how to deal with such big index changes?
Cheers,
Andrei
-
Thanks EGOL. Makes sense.
-
My response to this is to build small, compact websites where multiple related items are sold on the same page.
If products are grouped wisely by keywords, you can still have a broad keyword reach from a smaller site. Â Those longer pages have more words, more images, more buy buttons and are respected better by Google. Â Thus they rank better than short skimply pages.
Big websites that struggle to hold pages in the index do not compete well.
A smaller site does not spread your power out amongst a large number of pages.  The smaller the site the more competitive it will be against other larger websites of similar total linkstrength and authority.
-
Thanks EGOL for explaining. It makes sense. Â So Google discovers the urls via sitemap / internal link structure but then forgets about them because nobody reminds Google of them by linking to them.
I do understand that this is a common problem, so what set of tactics has worked so far for you in solving it?
-
If you have a website with six million pages, you will need a lot of inbound links to get all of those pages in to the index and held there.  When Google discovers your pages they will index them but if spiders do not revisit again, google will forget them.
For a website to hold six million pages in the index, it would need hundreds of powerful inbound links to thousands of average inbound links from other websites to deliver enough spider action. These links must be permanent to maintain a flow of spiders into the website. If they are temporarily applied the flow of spiders will be cut off and google will forget about those pages.
Also needed would be a good linkage structure that channels the spiders deep into those millions of pages so that they will be forced to chew their way out through other pages.
Weak websites with too many pages are a common problem.
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
-
Javascript content not being indexed by Google
I thought Google has gotten better at picking up unique content from javascript. I'm not seeing it with our site. We rate beauty and skincare products using our algorithms. Here is an example of a product -- https://www.skinsafeproducts.com/tide-free-gentle-he-liquid-laundry-detergent-100-fl-oz When you look at the cache page (text) from google none of the core ratings (badges like fragrance free, top free and so forth) are being picked up for ranking. Any idea what we could do to have the rating incorporated in the indexation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akih0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
JavaScript Issue? Google not indexing a microsite
We have a microsite that was created on our domain but is not linked to from ANYwhere EXCEPT within some Javascript elements on pages on our site. The link is in one JQuery slide panel. The microsite is not being indexed at all - when i do site:(microsite name) on Google, it doesn't return anything. I think it's because the link's only in a Java element, but my client assures me that if I submit to Google for crawling the problem will be solved. Maybe so, but my point is that if you just create a simple HTML link from at least one of our site pages, it will get indexed no problem.  The microsite has been up for months and it's still not being indexed - another newer microsite that's been up for a few weeks and has simple links to it from our pages is indexing fine. I have submitted the URL for crawling but had to use the google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url/ method as I don't have access to the top level domain WMT account. p.s. when we put the microsite URL into the SEOBook spider-test tool it returns lots of lovely information - but that just tells me the page is findable, does exist, right?  That doesn't mean Google's going to necessarily index it, as I am surmising...Moz hasn't found in the 5 months the microsite has been up and running.  What's going on here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers Any markup that could be used to be listed like this. Why is some sites listed like this and some not. Why is the adzuna.co.za page listed with Results 1-10 while some other with Jobs 1-10 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | classifiedtech0 -
Google Experiment
Hi there, are there any implications for organic seo for implementing google experiment. Where you send users to a new page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Google Places not appearing
is it possible to be sandboxed for a google places page? one of our clinics has a places page, and it was doing fine (http://www.google.com/maps/place?cid=5542269234389030356) but now whenever we set our location to trinity,fl and try to search for weight loss, weight loss trinity, etc.. it doesnt come up. it only comes up if we search medi weight loss trinity. also, when we go into our google places dashboard and try to edit the pictures, it doesnt show the same pictures on the actual locations page. for example, in our dashboard we have 5 pictures, but on the actual places page, 3 pictures are showing (none of which are in our dashboard). any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AustinBarton0 -
Google places: 7 weeks and still not verified. Reasons?
I've created Google Places entries for the business' 25 locations in 8 countries. It's been 7 weeks and Google hasn't validated my bulk upload yet. Which of the following would you say might do the trick? URL: I have pointed to http://site.com/country/city for every location. Should I point to http://site? I've created categories in English, but being this about local I guess I should do it in the local language of each country... Should I cancel the bulk upload and do one country per country? My list of countries include Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia so I don't know if manual verification is done by google centrally and that might be a problem. Otherwise the entries are (IMHO) well written, detailed and all. But I'm kind of desperate now because it's 7 weeks already... thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TIBA0 -
Google replacing subpages in index with home page?
Hi! I run a backlink building company. Recently, we had a customer who had us build targeted backlinks to certain subpages on his site. Then something really bizarre happened...all of a sudden, their subpages that were indexed in Google (the ones we were building links to) disappeared from the index, to be replaced with their home page. They haven't lost their rank, per se--it's just now their home page instead of their subpages. At this point, we are tracking literally thousands of keywords for our link building customers, and we've never run into this issue before. Have you ever run into it? If so, what's the best way to handle it from an SEO company perspective? They have a sitemap.xml and their GWT account reports no crawl errors, so it doesn't seem to be a site issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ownlocal0