Has anyone else noticed that googles index has drop a great bit. In my market I have seen the number of pages indexed go from almost 7 million to 3.5 million.This has occured in every phrase that I have searched up to this point for my real estate market. This may be a sign of something major coming. It doesnt appear to be old data, so what is google up to. Any thoughts?
Can they be duplicates being dropped? I'd imagine a lot of RE sites tap in the same listings databases.
I dont know if is related...When you do the link command "link:www.yoursite.com" I have noticed alot of spam being returned...You see in so of the titles to the spam "link:www.yoursite.com"...I just noticed this on a couple of sites of mine recently.Seen this in yahoo and the msn beta.
The real estate listings are not indexed by google. Most websites that have MLS on them are in frames and those listings can not be spidered. So I dont believe that is it. I believe google is up to something because I have seen the number of pages indexed go from 7 million down to 3.4 million twice today. Maybe G is about to do an update, who knows.
I've seen a drop in pool size, on *some* keyphrases. For my main (3 word) phrase, it was 1.2 mil before the index doubled. It went to 2.9 mil on the double. For the past week or so, the reported pool is 2.1 mil, about 28% smaller. My SERPs position hasn't really changed though with the smaller pool. For a 4 word phrase, it went from 117k to 256k on the double, and has held around there since.
It seems the number of pages indexed now has stablized at around 3.8 million, however for the last month it has been around 7 million. Google is up to something lol. On another note note I saw today as well that the MSN beta has drop its number of pages index for the same key phrase to 690k from 5.8 million.