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
-
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Huge Traffic Drop without any change on website
Hello there, I've experienced a huge website traffic drop and I can't find a reason. I redesigned and updated the SEO strategy in early December and the traffic was increasing, that's why I have no idea why that is happening. I have a video on home page and the views/day dropped a lot as well, but not as much as website visits! Any inputs? Best regards, NIB6rwF.png
Reporting & Analytics | | jancpc1 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Major practices which helps to index pages by google.
Actually, We have submitted more than 100 pages in to google through xml sitemap. But, we see in that 75% of the pages where indexed by google. Note : Excluding the duplicate pages
Reporting & Analytics | | Webworld_Norway0 -
100% sudden drop in traffic
Hi Guys I've just had an awful fright as Google Analytics is saying my website http://www.clintonpower.com.au has dropped to nil traffic since the 14th September. I've checked Google webmaster tools and all is OK with no malware or Google blacklisting that I can see. Any ideas how I can find out what's happened? This is super scary because 99% of my business comes from Google. I really have no idea what to do next or how to investigate the problem. Is there a way I can submit a query to Google through webmaster tools? Thanks in advance! Clinton Google-traffic.png
Reporting & Analytics | | ClintonP0 -
Massive raise and drop in keyword ranking
2 weeks ago I had a massive spike in keyword rankings 99 keyword went up. It was a quite happy week. the week later all keywords that went up dropped down to the same positions before the spike. now I have the same situation. this is the happy week with a very high spike. Anybody got a clue what is going on ?
Reporting & Analytics | | interelectronix0 -
Drop In Analytics
So I have a site that was getting about 200 hits (not a lot). They came to me and asked to do SEO. There were over 50 pages in HTML format so I created header/footers and changed the .html pages to .php. I set forwards up in the htaccess and everything. I did everything that I was suppose to. Now when I go to the analytics it almost looks like it lost all it's traffic from the keywords it was ranked in. Any ideas on why?
Reporting & Analytics | | blackrino0 -
Google URL Builder Extension showing up as indexed pages.
Hello, I was reviewing my PRO member campaign report. I see that I am getting warnings for too long of URLs. However, these URLs are my website URL with the Google URL builder tracking code that I set up for my marketing campaings. Why are these being indexed? For example: www.website.com/?utm_source=Oct+Newsletter&utm_medium=e.... Thank you, Kristen
Reporting & Analytics | | KLFeichtner0