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Thanks for the reference to past article. Got us to a decision!

What is the best practice for hosting a company blog for an eCommerce website? As a subfolder or as a subdomain or a separate domain entirely? Or some other option?  There are articles recommending each of these approaches, but it’s difficult to identify which is the most recently preferred approach.

Thanks, that coves it!

Yes, looking back at change logs was helpful. Canonical tags was it!  We found a bug, the canonical page tags were being truncated at 8 characters.  The number of pages indexed has started to increase rather than decrease, so it appears the issue is resolved.  But I would have thought the entire sitemap would get indexed once the issue was resolved, rather than small increases each day. Does that seem correct to have a slow increase back to normal, rather than getting back to nearly 100% indexed overnight?

We use multiple site maps.
Thanks, I had not thought about page load speed. But it turned up okay. Had already considered your other suggestions. Will keep digging.  Appreciate your feedback.

Any tips on why our GWMT Sitemaps indexed pages dropped to 27% of total submitted entries (2290 pages submitted, 622 indexed)?  Already checked the obvious Test Sitemap, valid URLs etc. We had typically been at 95% of submitted getting indexed.

Within Google Webmaster Tools --> Crawl Errors, you can check the errors and "Mark as Fixed". This should delete them from the list, giving you the ability to see other errors.