Drop in Page Indexing, Small rise in Search Queries

[luwhosjack]

Hello,

I have a news based website so i am creating multiple new posts daily. I changed a lot of the site and got rid of old potentially duplicate content back in feb and had a sharp drop in pages indexed. I know this was because I removed a lot of pages though. However I still have a good 20,000 + pages on my site and my indexing has dropped a further three times since then. From 9,000 to 2,000 a coupe of months ago and then slowly down since April to just 133.

It doesn't seem to have affected my search queries yet but surely will if it continues.

I am really confused as to how this might happen & how to turn it around. We dont use any dodgy SEO tricks either.

[Chris.Menke]

Lowhosjack,

If you've dropped from over 20K pages index to 133 without a drop in search traffic it would indicate a few  things to me:

1. All of your search traffic is landing on those 133 pages -- Have you looked at your stats history to see that you haven't been receiving traffic from other sources to your site other than to those pages?

2. You changed your architecture or your internal linkingprevious to your drop in indexation.--Other than deleting the duplicate content, did you make any other changes to your site?  You can crawl your site to verify Google can reach all of your pages with a tool like screamingfrog or xenu.

3. The content on those pages is low quality--Are you making sure that the content that you create is really worthwhile to your target audience?

If this was penalty related, I would think that the pages bringing in your traffic would be the ones hardest hit, so at this point, it doesn't look like a penalty but you really do need to get in to your stats and take a close look at what's been happening with the stats on those pages.

[Francisco_Meza]

There was a rolling update on Google that started in May around the 22nd. You may have been affected. Check your GA to see if any notable activity or decrease happened on that date.

[luwhosjack]

Thanks for your response Chris.

I changed the theme of my site though I did a google search on it and it returned no problems? I have had no messages on my Webmaster tools. I have done a scan with the Screaming Frog (thank you for the suggestions) and a lot of other stuff comes up but not so many of my posts and I have thousands. I am guessing this might be something to do with it - a question - is google unable to access what's in a drop down menu? This might be a problem.

[luwhosjack]

Also would you say it was a good or bad idea to stop tags and archives from being logged on the sitemap in wordpress SEO plug in? This may be an effecting issue?

[Dr-Pete]

So, first off, let me say that this isn't always a bad thing. Less indexed content, if much of your content is duplicated (or nearly duplicated) could actually improve the ranking of the rest of your content. More pages isn't better.

On the other hand, it's one thing when you proactively remove content from the index - it's another when Google does it for you. Are you seeing any patterns? As Chris said, it could be that your internal linking changed, or it could be that Google sees these pages as duplicate or low-quality and has removed them or implicitly canonicalized them (we're seeing more of that - it's like you have a rel=canonical on the page, but you don't). The other issue could be if there are duplicates on other site across the web, causing your copy to be filtered out.

Either way, you have to find out which pages are impacted and figure out the pattern. Do you have XML sitemaps? A well structured set of sitemaps can help you get a better sense of which pages are being indexed.