Google Index Constantly Decreases Week over Week (for over 1 year now)

[andreib]

Hi,

I recently started working with two products (one is community driven content), the other is editorial content, but I've seen a strange pattern in both of them.

The Google Index constantly decreases week over week, for at least 1 year. Yes, the decrease increased when the new Mobile version of Google came out, but it was still declining before that.

Has it ever happened to you? How did you find out what was wrong? How did you solve it?

What I want to do is take the sitemap and look for the urls in the index, to first determine which are the missing links. The problem though is that the sitemap is huge (6 M pages). Have you find out a solution on how to deal with such big index changes?

Cheers,

Andrei

[EGOL]

If you have a website with six million pages, you will need a lot of inbound links to get all of those pages in to the index and held there.   When Google discovers your pages they will index them but if spiders do not revisit again, google will forget them.

For a website to hold six million pages in the index, it would need hundreds of powerful inbound links to thousands of average inbound links from other websites to deliver enough spider action.  These links must be permanent to maintain a flow of spiders into the website.  If they are temporarily applied the flow of spiders will be cut off and google will forget about those pages.

Also needed would be a good linkage structure that channels the spiders deep into those millions of pages so that they will be forced to chew their way out through other pages.

Weak websites with too many pages are a common problem.

[andreib]

Thanks EGOL for explaining. It makes sense.  So Google discovers the urls via sitemap / internal link structure but then forgets about them because nobody reminds Google of them by linking to them.

I do understand that this is a common problem, so what set of tactics has worked so far for you in solving it?

[EGOL]

My response to this is to build small, compact websites where multiple related items are sold on the same page.

If products are grouped wisely by keywords, you can still have a broad keyword reach from a smaller site.  Those longer pages have more words, more images, more buy buttons and are respected better by Google.  Thus they rank better than short skimply pages.

Big websites that struggle to hold pages in the index do not compete well.

A smaller site does not spread your power out amongst a large number of pages.  The smaller the site the more competitive it will be against other larger websites of similar total linkstrength and authority.

[andreib]

Thanks EGOL. Makes sense.