Sudden Index drop, but traffic increased?
-
Here are the numbers-
Pages submitted on sitemap- About 18k
Total Pages indexed on 12/30- About 250k
Total Pages indexed on 1/6- About 81k
We made no site changes in that week, why the sudden drop? Also why is total pages indexed so much higher than sitemap?
-
I can't do the url but I have access to everything. Traffic is up since that happened, it hasn't hurt us at all. No landing pages have lost traffic. We got a completely new site in early November, is this just that site going away and being replaced with the new one?
-
need more info to make that determination, at very least the URL.
you can look at your analytics and take a look at what pages were bringing traffic and now what pages are driving most users to it to answer the traffic question.
the indexing question is more of a technical question that would need to be looked into from a coding and content perspective on your site
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
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Why would one of our section pages NOT be indexed by Google?
One of our higher traffic section pages is not being indexed by Google. The products that reside on this section page ARE indexed by Google and are on page 1. So why wouldn't the section page be even listed and indexed? The meta title is accurate, meta description is good. I haven't received any notices in Webmaster Tools. Is there a way to check to see if OTHER pages might also not be indexed? What should a small ecom site do to see about getting it listed? SOS in Modesto. Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Canonical Tags being indexed on paginated results?
On a website I'm working on which has a search feature with paginated results, all of the pages of the search results are set with a canonical tag back to the first page of the search results, however Google is indexing certain random pages within the result set. I can literally do a search in Google and find a deep page in the results, click on it and view source on that page and see that it has a canonical tag leading back to the first page of the set. Has anyone experienced this before? Why would Google not honor a canonical tag if it is set correctly? I've seen several SEO techniques for dealing with pagination, is there another solution that you all recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
My websites position has dropped, any ideas why?
Hi, First off im new here, so hello to everyone. Now to the reason why I have joined. I am currently trying to rank for 2 terms: **UK Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 1) **and Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 2) The page which im trying to rank these terms on is: http://www.followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays Now some background history: On the 29th Dec 2013, term 1 was 5th and term 2 was 7th - rankings achieved through guest blogging. Last night I changed the h1 tag from 'Bank Holidays 2013' to 'UK Bank Holidays 2013'. Re-worded the meta description to try and increase the CTR. And removed the term 'Bank Holiday' from the end of each sub-heading - Ex: 'New Year's Day Bank Holiday' to 'New Year's Day' - I did this because I felt it was to much so in total 'Bank Holiday' term had been removed from 5 sub-headings. Ok, so I went into WMT and resubmitted for indexing, over night the page got reindexed - the term 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' stayed at the same position (5) BUT the 'Bank Holidays 2013' term dropped into hell at roughly position 250. I'm thinking of changing everything back and crossing my fingers that term which dropped comes back BUT maybe im being to rash and it might jump back as the page stands. I did a grade test using SEOMOZ and both terms generate a grade of 'A'. Has anyone got any ideas? Sorry if the thread is a bit messy im currently crying all over the keyboard as im typing. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
Indexing an e-commerce site
Hi all, My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress. In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress? More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jenga110 -
Sitemap not indexing pages
My website has about 5000 pages submitted in the sitemap but only 900 being indexed. When I checked Google Webmaster Tools about a week ago 4500 pages were being indexed. Any suggestions about what happened or how to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Should we always avoid drop-down menus?
In Google's SEO Guide, they say avoid the use of drop-down menus, page 12: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf But, is this always true? What if you create the drop down purely using HTML & CSS? Is it fine to use a bit of javascript to create the drop-down menu, or should it only be HTML & CSS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0
