Lots of Pages Dropped Out of Google's Index?

[sbrault74]

Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc.

Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed.

Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this?

What should I interpret about this?

[sbrault74]

I think I may know why: I removed a lot of subcategories from my WP blog:

http://www.mywebsite.com/category/subcategory/post

to

http://www.mywebsite.com/category/post

I even changed one category's slug from:

http://www.mywebsite.com/updates/

to

http://www.mywebsite.com/news/

Could it have something to do with it?

[ThompsonPaul]

I'm betting all those subcategories were indexed (unless you had specifically set them not to be, to manage dupe content). If indexed then yea, removing/redirecting them is removing pages from your site, so obviously number indexed would show a reduction. Same if you removed tags.

When you made category changes e.g. changed /updates/ to /news/ did you make sure that WordPress created a proper redirect fro the old URL? If not, you'll get all those posts 404ing which will look like fewer pages indexed as well.

When you say you removed  low quality content - that could be a lot of pages right there.

Lastly, have you confirmed that your xml sitemap updated fully and correctly? If not, the crawlers could be looking for pages that no longer exist. (For example, pages that have been 301-redirected should no longer appear in the xml sitemap.

As you can see - lots of possibilities, but those are some starting points.

Paul