About a week ago I launched a new site on a very old domain (11 years), however I launched it on a subdomain (newsite.olddomain.com). I submitted a sitemap that had about 48,000 urls in it, and crossed my fingers. The first day it showed 91 pages indexed, second day was 2 pages, third day was 9800 pages, fourth day was 14,800 pages, fifth day was 9,800 pages and today its 8,250. Anyone have any idea why the pages indexed would change so wildly?
You are probably seeing results from different data centers. As the site will be classed as a new domain name (sub) it will take time for all data centers to synchronize. Hopefully you will see accurate figures within a month.
ok, thanks. That's another question I had, is a new subdomain treated as a wholly new domain, or is the fact its on an old domain taken into consideration?
And I don't really think it's different data centers because a drop in indexed pages corresponds to a drop in traffic from google.. exactly.
ok, also realized about 42k of my 48k submitted urls were formulated incorrectly. To make matters worse, when I input the malformed url into a browser, it doesn't 404 just gives me an empty template for my site :-( so I fixed and resubmitted. Maybe that's why the shifting results in the index.