Sudden Drop in Index Status on GSC
-
Hi all,
We've seen a sudden drop in index status on GSC from 19,000 to 12,000.
Rankings, referring domains, organic traffic etc. have not changed. However, we have implemented a huge number of redirects and done a site migration from http to https in the past year. Could this have an effect?
Thanks!
-
We have seen huge drops like that in the past. In our case, the new number seemed more accurate (what I would expect) - and I put it down to having implemented canonicals, pagination etc. which would have brought down the number of duplicate pages indexed.
If you haven't seen a drop in traffic I wouldn't be too worried.
-
Hi
19,000 seems like a lot of pages. I'd first ask yourself the question whether it is right to have so many pages in SERPS. Have you written or generated sufficiently engaging content and correct META for all of those pages?
Check the robots.txt file for any errors to see if you are excluding directories that you shouldn't be. For sure do a full site crawl to see if you need to canonicalise, no index or redirect any further pages that may be skinny, weak content (or special content e.g. catalog searches, account pages.).
1 page = 1 tight group of contextually similar keywords
I'd be more worries about organic visits that number of pages indexed. I seem to spend most of my life reducing page count !
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi,
It's possible that the site migration could have had an impact on the index. Did you notice the drop in the indexed pages immediately after the migration or just recently uncovered it? You can use Screaming Frog to perform a manual index to check on the total number of indexed pages and compare it to GSC to ensure it's accurate.
Alternatively, perform a 'Fetch as Google', followed by 'Index' to perform a manual index in GSC to check if there's any indexing issues.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Penguin 4.0 update: drop in results end of September
Has anyone noticed certain drops in keyword rankings on/around 29 September? Has this to do with the Penguin 4.0 update? I read that this hasn't come "bug-free". Will this be adjusted the upcoming weeks? Or is this drop content-based based on the new algorithms and the content needs to be adjusted/updated?
Reporting & Analytics | | Mikrocentrum0 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
Average Session duration has dropped on May 12th and not recovered
Hello, On May 12th my average session duration within Google Analytics went from 1.12 seconds to 10 seconds. Every month since then it has had an average session duration of around 10 seconds. My traffic over this time has increased. I am concerned that the website is being attacked by bots. What should I be looking out for to work out what is happening? Many thanks for your help.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
Homepage disappeared from Google's index
The Title says it all..I just discovered that the Homepage is not in Google's index anymore. Homepage rankings have plummeted, our top keywords are nowhere to be found but most of keywords from deeper pages have dropped just one or two places. We just change the website design and some content but I strongly believe this is definitely something else due to the fact that it all happened so fast! There is one thing that I have to mention that might have been caused all this..our email client (Outlook) is using a lot of resources from our server and for the last couple of days the website was down quite a lot.
Reporting & Analytics | | echo1
There are some crawling errors in GWT but the homepage has been crawled because is not there, no other messages. Where should I look for?0 -
Bing Won't Index Site - Help!
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why my client's site is not indexed on bing and yahoo search engines. My Google analytics is telling me I’m getting traffic (very little traffic) from Bing almost daily but Bing webmaster tools is telling me I’ve received no traffic and no pages have been indexed into Bing since the beginning of December. At once point I was showing ranking in Bing for only one keyword then all of a sudden none of my pages were being indexed and I now rank for nothing for that website. From Google I’m getting over 1200 visits per month. I have been doing everything I can to possibly find the culprit behind this issue. I feel like the issue could be a redirect problem. In webmaster tools on Bing I’ve used “Fetch as Bingbot” and every time I use it I get a Status of “Redirection limit reached.”. I also checked the CRAWL Information and it’s saying all the URL’s to the site are under 301 redirect. A month or so ago the site was completely revamped and the canonical URL was changed from non www to www. I have tried manually adding pages to be indexed multiple times and Bing will not index any of the sites pages. I have submitted the sitemap to Bing and I am now at a loss. I don’t know what’s going on and why I can’t get the site listed on Bing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
GA stopped tracking traffic, suddenly, why¿? :-/
2 days ago GA stopped receiving data. It only stopped for one account of all my projects. At this moment there are 5 persons navigating the site and these days there where numerous visitors as they contacted the support team thru the site. GA says that it's receiving the code, hw, I checked it twice. The tracking code is located below the footer, in the body. It was there for few years.... I also checked if there is some js conflict, negative. Is there something that could make the tracking to stop? Does anybody experienced similar problems¿? Should I be worried...¿? (and with SEOmoz server with issues not sure when will see new results.......) EDIT: In Web Master Tools I see results for indexing, with yesterday date, so I assume that the site crawling is ok and must be GA issue.
Reporting & Analytics | | MilosMilcom0 -
Page Optimization score is An A but Rank is dropping
New to company in SEO and they wanted a page to rank high for certain term : knowledge management on this page: http://www.apqc.org/knowledge-management Ran SEO Moz optimizer and did suggested changes. Moved score to A and ranking was on google first page but now it's dropped considerably last 2 months as the bounce rate has gone through the roof. I'm at my wits end and don't want the higher ups on me for the drop. I'm not sure what to try next.
Reporting & Analytics | | inhouseninja0 -
Links and index missing from Google Webmaster Tools!
I've been using a wordpress blog and using google analytics and webmaster tools. I'd never done very much optimizing of my site, my strategy had always been to just keep writing relevant posts and let google do the rest. At some point I installed a SEO plugin to wordpress and did a tiny amount of tweaking, but I noticed that in my webmaster tools page, all my "links to this site" links are gone! My site map says 42 pages submitted, 42 pages indexed, but all the links that I've built over the past few years are missing, and I also notice that I can't find my main landing page in the index anymore. I know there are indexed sites out there that link to me, but they aren't being reflected anymore. Did I anger google by using SEO plugins within wordpress? I'm fairly certain I wasn't doing anything sketchy. Http://brodiegraphics.com RTOH6.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HELPeR0