Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
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We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them.
I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
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An SEO who thinks adding thousands of useless pages will do a website good? Get rid of them, or (preferably) get them re-educated!
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I cant say that it is down to the panda update because im not 100% sure but from what your saying about the spun content and what you can see the panda update is all about then its likely to be.
Although the update is in July it does not mean your be hit straight away, but its only been a month from the update to you loosing results in the index and it just so happens the update is to combat duplicate and spun content.
Have your load times decreased?
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I thought Panda was in July, this appears to be around mid Aug that the drop occurred.
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Its the content.
Google launched an update to its algo called the panda update which basically hammered duplicate/spun content websites this year.
If you Google 'Google panda update' have a little read your find loads of ammo to throw back.
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Yes, we have 1.2m pages with content generated from spintext like algorithms. I'm not in charge of our SEO strategy I'm the one that has to develop it but when i hear them blaming load times(my problem) instead of content(their problem) it really makes me question how well they're really doing. I've been trying to tell our "expert" load times are not the issue but yet he keeps coming back to us with that instead of changes to the content.
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Well I just checked our webmaster tools and on average 1-2 seconds is a fast load time, so im 99% here your correct that its not load times.
When you say 'spun up' do you mean you have 1.2m pages which are basically spun content? If so thats most likely the problem.
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I'm pretty sure they indexed about double of that at one point and then the pages that appeared in their index cut in half one day. Again our SEO guy told us this was normal and that we need to speed up the pages and release more pages.
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It could be the structure,
You might find Google is struggling to find those pages that you want crawled.
If those pages are 5 clicks away from the homepage Google will need to follow down those links as well to find it.
So you could have homepage - category - sub category - paging number 9 - page you want found.
Just a thought!
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With such fast load speeds there is no way you're running into trouble on that front. It's far more likely that it's a quality issue, especially if you believe there are a number of poorly generated pages.
Are there any discrepancies between the number of pages you're seeing on Google and Bing via the site:domain.com query, and the number of pages in the index as shown in Webmaster Tools? It's always possible that some other form of indexing issue is at play.
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