Index dropped 20 pages at once since yesterday

[Marc1987]

Hi community,

I just realized that my indexed pages dropped from the amount of 95 to 75 and I don't know why. I did some title tag arrangements because we are launching with our first product (before that it was just a blog). I did these changes 1 week ago and fetched to google the homepage and some subdomains.

Thanks for your help.

Kind regards

Marco

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Excellent news - glad it has all returned

-Andy

[Marc1987]

Everything is back to normal.

Thanks again, Andy.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No problem at all

[Marc1987]

Andy, thanks so much for that piece of quality content!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I think this might explain your issue...

Gary Illyes @methode

Bad news: we might have a problem with reporting the number of indexed URLs in the SC Sitemaps feature. Good news: we're looking into it

Soooo, it looks like the number of indexed pages in Webmaster Tools (Search Console) is being reported incorrectly.

That would explain what you are seeing

-Andy

[Marc1987]

Thanks a lot Andy,

maybe it has something to do with "fetching as google", which I did around 1 week ago with they main homepage as I changed some major keywords (titel tag) and moved them to other sites (blog categories etc) when I added our first product/collection.

Nevermind - time will tell

Thanks again!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

You aren't disturbing Marco

It really isn't uncommon to see discrepancies like this. I see them every day! A 25% drop like this suggests to me that Google is perhaps doing a little bit of a reshuffling.

I would wait just a bit to see if the number of pages starts to increase as there isn't an awful lot else you can do - it sounds like it has all been done.

-Andy

[Marc1987]

That is what I did around 7 days ago, so before the drop of index.

[Rosebankcollege]

Try to identiy pages that has more links and use "fetch as google" and chose to re-crawl the URL.

[Marc1987]

Thanks for the tip - I will do that. But I don't understand how this has something to do with this issue. At the moment all search engines show my sites ranking (so probably indexed). Just Search Console is giving me some wrong(?) information. I don't think there can be a discrepancy in a way that Google Search Console shows me de-indexing in advance of google serp.

Cheers

[Rosebankcollege]

did you also verify your site under bing/yahoo webmaster tools. if not yet i suggest you do you will be surprised how faster and how effective is bing yahoo indexation. wait for couples of days en perform the site: www.domain.com you will see how index differ with google

[Marc1987]

Hi,

thanks for your help. "site:domain"-check in bing and yahoo show the exact same as google. So all the pages are currently in serps.

[Rosebankcollege]

do similar check on bing and yahoo. they are much more effective and speedy than google but problem is market share that google have

[Marc1987]

Hi Andy,

sorry for disturbing, but I just did a check with "site:paleotogo.de" in google search and it found all pages.

In Search Console it tells me my blog has 54 out of 75 indexed (this was the sudden drop I spoke about earlier). But when I look further into the blog sitemap it shows me all 75 pages when I count them.

What is happening here? I really don't understand

Cheers, Marco

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No problem at all. Just update here if it hasn't rectified itself soon and we can take another look

-Andy

[Marc1987]

Thanks for your help, Andy - really appreciate it. Hope everything will turn out well.

Just realized I forgot to mention the page it is about: www.paleotogo.de

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Ah sorry, I missed that bit Marco.

When Google drop pages from the index, it can be for a whole host of reasons. However, Google never indexed 100% of pages (or very, very rarely). If you were at 95% and now at 75%, then this would suggest to me that Google has either lost some level of trust in the pages or you will just have to wait until the pages are re-indexed and Google has decided what to do with them again.

I would be tempted to wait for a little bit as over time, you should see pages being re-indexed again. If you have already re-submitted the sitemap, just make sure there is no problem with that - rebuild it and then re-submit if you haven't already, just to be sure.

-Andy

[Marc1987]

Hi Andy,

it's not about the drop of a specific keyword, it's about the drop of indexed pages going from 100% indexed to around 75% indexed.

Cheers

Marco

[Marc1987]

Hi Moosa,

thanks for your help! I did a resubmit 2 hours ago and just checked again, but it didn't index all of the pages (20 left again).

Strange.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Marco,

It all depends on what you were tracking as phrases before, and now after you have made the changes. If you were tracking for the phrase "Red Sneakers" and changed the title to "Blue Sneakers" then you would expect to see a drop with your original phrase. Have you updated your tracking to compensate for the changes?

-Andy

[MoosaHemani]

Ideally just by changing the title tags the index should not be dropped but if this is something you have noticed, you can always update your sitemap.xml and resubmit it to Google and in the next crawl it should be indexed again.

Hope this helps!