Sudden Drop in Index Status on GSC
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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!
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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.
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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
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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!
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