Indexed pages dropping

This is strange.

I have lost 90% of my indexed pages (google) - but held PR, held my rankings, even improved them slightly. (http://www.lincolnvscadillac.com)

This started just after the last update, but its only this site that its happening to, none of my others nor a few competitors I track. All those are increasing pages.

I didnt make any dramatic changes -- We had a COOP change and a PR change in that time frame - my backlinks did spike at the same time since everything changed (dropping of the cap and the pr upgrade to a PR6 caused me to have alot of new coop weight)


I waited thinking maybe it was temporary or something, but it just keeps getting worse.

Any ideas? See chart attached for pages indexed history.

 

Double check everything on your site.

Same thing has happened to a few of my sites. When I did a check, on one of them I had loads of broken links (I have absolutely no idea of how they got broken), on another one I had an incorrect robots.txt file and was blocking thespiders, on another one I didn't have my pages well linked so there was no way for the spiders to find them.

Stupid little errors, but they cused hundreds of pages to vanish. The good thing is that Google knows that these errors can happen, so once I fixed everything it took a couple of weeks to get all my pages back.

 

I have also seen this happen when google is making reindexing. Seems like it almost rolls back to an old index for a bit...

 

Yeah, Ive checked all that.

I dont see this as a rollback because things have just gotton worse - and im talking about since April 20th.

 

I had the same thing happen to me around the same time. One of my sites was deindexed slowly down to 0 pages. I looked over the site and did find a broken link to my privacy policy--doh--I don't remember when I added it though.

Anyway fixed the link now 2-3 weeks later and all of a sudden bang 3500 pages indexed. The site had way more before. I don't know if it was the broken link or not. Just happy its getting reindexed. It was holding some number one spots for some good broad keywords.

 

Had a similar issue. Turned out a lot of pages turned into supplementals on my forum. The supplemental pages were really old threads (greater than a year). I never did get them back and am in a similar position to you. I'm back up to 6,000 indexed pages, but still have a long way to go to get to the 15,000 I had before.

 

Create a fresh site map using all absolute urls. When I say fresh I mean fresh. List all major urls that are less than 3 clicks from parent url. Then point a clean PR7 to the site map. I use this process to kick-start indexing when de-indexing or dup filters have been implemented.
Caution: Make sure all links travel to target and dup pages are erased and definitely make sure PR7 is clean.

 

any quick tutorial on creating a site map, something i have yet todo?

 

Thats a good idea. Thanks.

First im running through the site and making some changes so that'll be noticed also.

Im wondering if the surge in backlinks contributed to this as well.

 

You should use some of your coop weight and point many ads to all kind of inner pages, not just your home page.

 

I do - always have.