I've had a site for more than a month and at first, Google was indexing it fine and the amount of indexed pages was slowly going up. However, two weeks into its existence, Google dropped the amount of indexed pages by at least half. Out of 10,300 posts, 300 are currently in the index. Yesterday, there were about 3400 indexed. I have a feeling that I'm doing something terribly wrong. I can't do any SEO or make money because I can't rank for anything in Google with such a small amount of indexed pages. It's a Wordpress site with movies and such. There's also a sitemap, which I imagine would not cause this huge change in indexed pages. Any ideas?
if you have a new site, this can be usual. google has multiple datacenters and depending on which datacenter you are pulling the result from, number of indexed pages can vary. they will even out over time given that your posts are all unique. duplicate content pages will get deindexed
try to make the site dynamic by changing the pages frequently. also increase backlinks to increase crawl rate
I'm no expert, but struggling with some of the same things as you. Especially when my site was new, this kind of stuff happened all the time. Stay patient and be persistent with basic SEO techniques and your numbers will come around.
Yahoo is showing around 1100 backlinks. Even though Google shows less, the bots still crawl it regularly. Good to hear that I'm not the only one! It's just a bit frustrating because my site before this was indexed fast and no pages have been dropped from the index.