Changes in Sitemap Indexation in GWT?

[JoeAmadon]

I've noticed some significant changes in the number and percentage of indexed URLs for the sitemaps we've been submitting to Google. I've been tracking these numbers directly from Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Sitemaps. We've made some changes that could be causing the changes we're seeing, but I want to confirm that this wasn't just a change in the way Google reports the indexation.

Has anyone else noticed major changes, greater than a 30% change, in the indexation of your sitemaps in the past week?

Thanks,

Joe

[rhutchings]

What time frame are you talking here?

Edit:  I manage about 25 different sites, and I have seen a large fluctuation (increase for the most part) since April/May.I have seen upwards of 50%.  Most of my flucuation i think was due do some good site/url structure and SEO work i did a while ago, and i gather that panda & google have liked some of the changes (about freakin time).  It has not been due to an increased content.

[JoeAmadon]

Sorry I forgot to specify that this has been over the past week.

Thanks for the reply, Ryan.

[rhutchings]

Just the past week i am not too sure.  Out of curiosity, how do you track your indexed pages?  Right now i dump manually into excel for historical records and tracking, which lends to not doing it more than every month or two.  You just eyeballing weekly and notice changes?

[JoeAmadon]

I use the same manual approach, manually dumping into Excel on a regular basis. I'll usually increase the frequency if we are making changes that should effect indexation.

[BoulderJoe]

Hey Joe,

I noticed the same thing (large drop in indexed number/percentage of pages) a few days ago and thought that was related to a ranking drop I have experienced.  All I did was resubmit all (tag, category, posts) sitemaps via GWT and the next day Google had almost 100% of my submitted URLs back in the index.  However, that didn't fix my apparent Google penalty issue so I'm still searching for a solution:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-with-diagnosing-google-penalty

Oh, this was with a wordpress site utilizing Yoast's WP SEO plugin to create XML sitemaps.