Last time I checked the number of pages Google had indexed from my site--can't recall exacte date, but it was 6 or 7 days ago--it showed 14,000+ pages indexed. Today it shows 6,900. Is Google doing somthing? Anyone else noticed a drop in pages indexed?
Not sure if it applies to your site or not, but Google has been filtering out duplicate content/spam looking sites more aggressively lately.
Shaw if this is dup content filter tah cause pages to drop explain this: Some of my site one day have 500 pages in google (with site: command) the next day google shows 4 600 pages ;/. It can be due to dup content filter, 90% of pages on this site are similar. The funny thing is taht when pages count drop, then the following day google shows more indexed pages than before the drop. For example: 26.11.2004 - 2500 pages, 27.11.2004 - 500 pages, 28.11.2004 - 4688 !!
Yeah, I have seen a couple of our sites bounce all over the place. They are not new sites either. One has gone from ~20k pages to almost 60k when they announced the index doubled in size, and now it is bouncing between 3k and 12k.
It is not just duplicate content and spam. One of my websites has had its page count drop as well. None of them have duplicate content or is filled with spam. I think it may be part of a algo change that they are testing or reverting back to some old cache data.
If my wife wasnt a Doctor, I would have to as well. This is enough to give you even more than heartburn.
I agree with Las Vegas Homes. It looks like different datacenters are using different info (vastly different). I haven't been able to pick up which is which, but the number of pages bounces back and forth a lot on www.google.com. Actually, I am starting to think there is a new datacenter (or more than one) that we don't know about yet, since I can't seem to match these anomalies up with known datacenters. But possibly, I just haven't found it yet.