Sitemap indexed pages dropping

[zenstorageunits]

About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.

[WilliamKammer]

Try to determine when the drop off started, and try to remember what kinds of changes the website was going through during that time. That could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing.

There are plenty of reasons why Google may choose not to index pages, so this will take some digging. Here are some places to start the search:

• Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable

• Check to make sure the content on those pages isn't duplicated somewhere else on the Web.

• Check to see if there was any updates to canonical changes on the site around when the drop started

• Check to make sure the sitemap currently on the site matches the one you submitted to Webmasters, and that your CMS didn't auto-generate a new one

• Make sure the quality of the pages is worth indexing. You said your traffic didn't really take a hit, so it's not de-indexing your quality stuff.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Stephen,

Checking in to see if you had checked the points William has raised above. Do you see anything that could have resulted in the drop? Also, are you comfortable sharing the site here? We might be able to have a look too (feel free to PM if you are not comfortable sharing publicly).

Cheers,

Jane

[zenstorageunits]

Thanks for checking, I haven't found anything yet.The site is goautohub.com. it's a custom site and the site map file is auto generated. It's goautohub.com/sitemap.php. I've done it like that for over a year. I did start seeing an error message about high response times and I've been working on improving that. It makes since because we have been advertising more to get the site seen. In regards to the rest of Williams points I have checked those but no improvement yet. Thank you

[JaneCopland]

How are the indexed numbers looking in WMT today? I see 3,370 results for a site: search on the domain, but those can be iffy in terms of up to date accuracy: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agoautohub.com&oq=site%3Agoautohub.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.798j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8

Not that this should matter too much if you are submitting a sitemap through WMT but your robots.txt file specifies sitemap.xml. There is a duplciate sitemap on that URL (http://goautohub.com/sitemap.xml) - are you using sitemap.php, which you mention here, in WMT? .php can be used for sitemaps, but I would update the robots.txt file to reflect the correct URL - http://i.imgur.com/uSB1P1g.png, whichever is meant to be right. I am not aware of problems with having duplicate sitemaps, as long as they are identical, but I'd use just one if it were me.

[zenstorageunits]

Thats a good catch, I fixed that. I do use that in WMT and it has been fine for the longest time.  I guess its not that big of an issue, my main concern was the pages being indexed. Was reading another Q&A thing and used the info: qualifer to check some of the pages and all the ones I checked are indexed and its more then the 11. I just don't understand why its dropped all a sudden, and if that number really means anything.

mmx7719

[zenstorageunits]

I may have found the issue today. Most of the articles are pulled from a database and I think I placed a wrong canonical tag on the page which screwed up everything. Does anyone know how long it takes  before a fix like this will show?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Stephen,

Great that you've probably found the cause - this will absolutely cause mass de-indexation. I had a client a year ago canonicalise their entire site (two sites, actually) to the home page. All their rankings and indexed pages dropped off over a matter of about six days (we spotted the tag immediately but the fix went into a "queue" - ugh!).

The bad news is that it took them a long time to get properly re-indexed and regain their rankings (I am talking months, not weeks). Having said this, the sites were nearly brand new - they had very few backlinks and were both less than six months old. I do not believe that an older site would have had as much problem regaining rankings, but I can't be sure and I have only seen that situation take place first-hand once.

[zenstorageunits]

Just wanted to update this, it took a month but since I decided to completely remove canonical tags and try and handle duplicate content with url rewrites and 301 redirects and I now have 114 out of 149 indexed from my sitemap which is much better. it ended up to dropping to 5 out of 149 at one point.