Page counts falling...falling...falling....

For the last couple weeks, especially this week, G's page count for all of my sites has been going down gradually every day. From 40K to 20K to 10K to 1K. The pages are not dynamically generated: they do have real URL's, but they must be too similar...

Anyone else seeing this?

 

Does your page design rely heavily on tables?
I think this may cause a problem.

 

I noticed the same thing,
the page count was in slow but constant growth when they stopped to increase for a week and now they are falling...
I don't think it can be caused by use of tables. It has no sense to me as tables are one of the most primitive html tags and I see no harm nor correlation with page count.

 

I'm getting the same problem. I haven't any tables though...

I think google has flagged my site up for dupe content - even though this IS NOT the case.

 

I too think these drops can be related to duplicate content. In some areas, I am seeing the same.

 

It's not so much DUPLICATE, it's more that some sites, like DangerMouse's are too similar when compared page to page.

If you have a fixed left Nav bar, fixed header, fixed static right feature bar plus a fixed footer, all with a decent amount of spiderable text in it, then you have a recipe for duplicate flagging.

In that case, you will need VERY dissimilar body text, and at least a few hundred words of it in order to survive as being an original page. Where 'duplicate' used to be when 95%ish was the same, now it's duplicate or 'crap/low-content' when your pages, compared to each other, are 40%ish (no hard facts) the same.

Solution: Trim down the static stuff, expand the body with original, dissimilar and quality content. And do that on each and every page. And make sure all meta tags differ distinctively from page to page, as well as the file dates etc.

Even my suggestion to DangerMouse of adding RSS wouldn't be ideal since this still is the same. You'll need some real different content per page to get out of this shit.

 

Well I mention tables because it can cause very little variation in content.

My theory is maybe because sites with heavy usage of tables causes little variation:

<?php
function similarity($str1, $str2) {
	similar_text($str1, $str2, $alike);

	return round($alike, 2);
}

$str1 = '<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>LALALALA In Blue</td>
</tr>
</table>';
$str2 = '<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>WYWYWYWY In Blue</td>
</tr>
</table>';
$str3 = '<div>LALALALA In Blue</div>';
$str4 = '<div>WYWYWYWY In Blue</div>';

$tablePerc = similarity($str1, $str2);
$divsPerc = similarity($str3, $str4);

echo 'Tables: ', $tablePerc, '%, DIVs: ', $divsPerc, '%, Difference: ', trim($tablePerc - $divsPerc, '-'), '%';
?>

PHP:

I can't be sure tho...

Another thing I would look into is people doing 302 redirects / Meta redirects to your sites.

 

It's not som much the table code itself, coz I assume the dup filters leave out html code. when checking.

It does have to do with tables in the sense I explained above, where people have two TRs and 2 TDs with no changing content. That basically gives you a template which in some cases is automatically 75% of each page's content. Then when the body, which to follow this example adds up to 25%, is very similar to the body of other internal pages then voila... Duplicate Content.

It should be renamed to Little-Dissimilar Content IMO.

XML: Very good point about the 302s. Can take you down almost overnight.

Do a link: search and find the pages linking to you. Put the linking url in http://www.seologic.com/webmaster-tools/url-redirect.php and see the header response. If 302, then you're screwed. For more info, see the threads about content hijacking and 302 in general.

 

I've noticed Google doing strange things with page counts lately. One site that I manage has had page counts from 2,000 to 12,000 in the last six weeks. At one point Google was even listing javascript photo popups for this site!!!