Couple of month ago we added a directory type listings (500,000) to our 3 year old active website as a subdomain. Checking on google webmasters tool, we had over 14,000 pages indexed within the first month and now for the past 2 weeks the number of indexed pages have been dropping to 5,000 now. Does anyone know what the problem might be?
Hello, Actually Google has two types of index, main index and supplemental index. main index contains all the unique and quality pages while the supplemental index contains all those pages which have been indexed but are not shown to searcher as they are not considered important or have some or the other content which exists in the pages present in the main index. as you have stated that you added it on the sub-domain, the problem with the sub-domain is that, it must be absolutely unique to win favors with the Google. if it has some or the other related content, the pages will never be indexed. therefore sites like Google or Yahoo! use sub-domain only for those categories which are completely unique and not related to the parent website in any manner. Hope i answered your query. Thanks & Regards Shailendra
that is correct. The process of weeding out dupes is ongoing, so expect more pages to 'drop' over time as google decides that your version of any particular article isn't the 'definitive' version. This is why you should ALWAYS make your content unique. It's not like it's difficult nowadays - just click a button!
Hi, It may be of interest to know that when our no. of pages indexed went from 100,000 to 1,000,000 we saw no obvious increase in natural traffic to our website. It happened when we added a filter system to the site and I guess googlebot just found many more pages. Fortunately when the pages (some months later) dropped down to about 100,000 it equally made no difference to our natural traffic volumes.