Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After

[Travis-W]

Hi there,

I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
The site is www.consumerbase.com.

We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed.

I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html

I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT!  A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages.  Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad.  http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV

While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them.

I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able.

What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.

[Jonathan1979]

Many of your pages are very similar with just changes in keywords \ headings.  I appreciate with that many pages it will be hard to make them more unique but as a result it may take longer for them to index, if at all.

There is also not much text on each of the pages, so I wouldn't class the content as particularly good quality either (in terms of what google sees), which also may hinder the chances of getting indexed.  Plus 2 weeks for a site like that is too soon to tell whether Google will index them.  The initial indexing of alot of pages is quite usual.

Short of changing the pages, all I can suggest is build up your site's authority.

[Travis-W]

Thanks for the response.  Is there a particular number of words per page or tex-to-code ratio I should strive for?

[Jonathan1979]

Sorry, I only gave a brief look at your site, but my first impressions was that there was very little content, and many outgoing links.

When I try to rank keyword pages I have a minimum of 500 words within the content area, but mostly try to aim for 700 - 1000.  Of course this is not always possible, but you have alot of duplicate pages, plus very little text on each of those pages.  I have tried to rank local seo keywords with very similar content like that, and I find it takes alot longer to get indexed and might even bounce in and out of the serps for a while.

Gaining more authority will help, as will inserting more text as you can insert more keyword \ keywords variations without appearing spammy with the keyword density.  I think ultimately without unique content you have to be prepared to wait a while for them to be all indexed, and even then there is no guarantee (although better site authority should help).

Also might be worth checking your sitemap structure.  I believe there is a limit on what each sitemap can have, so you may need to split it up over several although I believe some plugins do this automatically.