My search didn’t yield any answers. I had been observing after the Easter holidays had passed a significant drop of about 30% on a few websites of mine that mostly are all forum based web pages. This loss has equaled on a monthly basis to about 100,000. Then I observed that many pages were dropped off the index by Google. For each site this was resulting to about 150,000. On a routine basis I had been keeping a watch on this and also noticed that my competitor firms too were facing the same problem. All my sites are as old as 7 years and so there were many pages. What is Google doing? Are they cleaning out their old stuff and removing results to an archive? If anyone else is facing these problems too, I would be interested to hear them out. What can be done to get a whole lot more pages on Google?
A lot of people are reporting this. I suggest you don't worry too much. First of all, are you saying your pages are being deindexed because the site: operator returns fewer pages? Then you should know that site: is extremely buggy and not actionable. It can be wildly inaccurate, and it usually is so for large sites. You some of your pages don't appear when you search with site:, chances are that they are not deindexed. Can you actually find pages you know were indexed before but are now not chached? Secondly, if it's happening to you, it's probably also happening to your competitors. Third, your "indexation budget," as Google has recently admitted, depends on your domain PR and on your site architecture. Build more links, both internal and backlinks. Do more deep linking with backlinks. This will improve your crawling and indexation.
It's been happening a lot recently, I notice over 50 seperate threads on DP forums citing a similar problem. Not sure why though
Have you tried to look up the given pages specifically to see if they were deindexed? If they're years-old forum threads that aren't getting any more new replies, they might just be dropping down in the listings past where anyone could normally find it.
Probably a really major google dance/update. Aside personal websites, I've seen a lot of "Solid" SERPS of many mainstreamed keywords that served me well in the past gone wild now. I hope that Google gonna end this cleanup soon as I just waste my time of finding the stuff I've found before on Google quite easily.
4 sites of mine had just received a google penalty and dropped 50 positions, because they were on same ip
Google's new algorithm surely affects the ranking although they are trying to make the SERP result closely the same to previous rankings..
that's right.. also noticed that google are testing their different interface on some of their data centers.. i accessed one yesteday... but not sure if the results are also different..
It might not be a very huge problem since a lot of people are talking about it but the standard options like continuing to add fresh contents plus links could be great. The websites structures too could be very important in this respect.