Anyone managed to decrease the "not selected" graph in WMT?

[Further]

Hi Mozzers.

I am working with a very large E-com site that has a big issue with duplicate or near duplicate content. The site actually received a message in WMT listing out pages that Google deemed it should not be crawling. Many of these were the usual pagination / category sorting option URL issues etc.

We have since fixed the issue with a combination of site changes, robots.txt, parameter handling and URL removals, however I was expecting the "not selected" graph in WMT to start dropping.

The number of roboted pages has increased by around 1 million pages (which was expected) and indexed pages has actually increased despite removing hundreds of thousands of pages. I assume this is due to releasing some crawl bandwidth for more important pages like products.

I guess my question is two-fold;

1. Is the "not selected" graph cumulative, as this would explain why it isn't dropping?

2. Has anyone managed to get this figure to significantly drop? Should I even care? I am relating this to Panda by the way.

Important to note that the changes were made around 3 weeks ago and I am aware not everything will be re-crawled yet.

Thanks,
Chris

notselected.jpg

[Further]

Very interesting. I'm also convinced the "not selected" graph is a big clue towards a Panda penalty. I guess I will have to wait another couple of weeks to see if our changes have affected the graph. Maybe this time lag is why it can take upwards of 6 months to get recover from Panda!

[SanketPatel]

Hi Chris

Here is the nice information about the "Not Selected" data in WMT. I hope this post will help you more to understand about the Not Selected Graph : http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366

[Klarke]

The "Not Selected" isn't cumulative.   The "Ever Crawled" is though.

I have a large Wordpress content site.  It was hit by Panda on a very same day that my "not selected" multiplied by 8.  I don't think it was a coincidence, and I didn't make any large changes to the site besides the regular addition of about 10 posts per week.

I've been able to effect a downward movement on the not selected count by removing/redirecting things like "replytocom" variable URLs in the comments section;reworking print and email versions of each article, etc.   It very slow though, only reducing by an average of 100 per week.

Needless to say, I think the not selected metric means quite alot.