Large Drop in Indexed Pages But Increase in Traffic

[sa_78704]

We run a directory site and noticed about a week ago that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting a huge drop in indexed pages (from around 150,000 down to 30,000).  In the same time, however, our traffic has increased.

Has anyone seen this before or have any ideas on why this could happen?  I have search for technical errors but nothing has changed on our site or our content.

[uBreakiFix]

The first thing that comes to my mind is Robots.txt, Did you modify that at all?, Did you have it not index dynamic attributes. If you do have a lot of dynamic attributes I would also suggest looking at search console and setting up your URL Parameters, You will want to see how Google is indexing them.

LfFM2zj

[sa_78704]

Hey Jonathan,

robots.txt has not changed and I verified using the "fetch as Google" tool that the un-indexed pages are not being blocked.  We also don't have any dynamic attributes or parameters in the URL.  Everything was fine and getting indexed (I should mention this site is only 6 months  old) and then BAM, indexed pages drop 80% while at the same time traffic goes up.  This is a head scratcher!

Ryan

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[sa_78704]

Hi James,

Thanks for the input.  Yes, the increased traffic we are getting is quality search traffic from Google on good search terms.  However, it appears they have de-indexed many of our pages that do not seem to be of low quality.  We took great measures to avoid duplicate and low-quality content.

Ryan

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