The amount of sites indexed have continued to drop, from 92 to 65 to 41 to now 29. Today it is 24. I am getting no sitemap error messages, and I have even redid my sitemap.xml to make sure there were no duplicate links. This is the first time I have seen this happen. I typically have maybe 1 or 2 links not indexed. I cannot figure out for the life of me why my numbers are continuing to drop. This has been going on for a month. Please help. I should point out that I reduced the speed of my Crawl Rate from 2.0 seconds per request to Google Recommended request. I have no unreachable links either, so I don't think Crawl Rate has much do to with why I am dropping index numbers. I tried asking on Google's webmaster help forum, but no one replied. I am hoping to find help here. Thank you.
It never happened on my site, my only advice is you should be patient, and keep posting, and active in the forum .....
I certainly will . Thank you for the response. I just wish I knew what caused it. In time, hopefully it will go back up.
Still seems to be dropping. Has this happened to anyone else on these forums? This is the first time I have seen it drop.
The most probable reasons are duplicate content and a lot of spammy external links. Sitemaps have nothing to deal with it.
From what I can tell we have no duplicate content, as far as spammy external links, that may be possible. We have a blog which talks about the latest technology / software. Example: We talk about Windows 7 or Apple's Snow leopard and usually link out through that. However we usually use a rel="nofollow" tag. I am not 100% sure if thats the cause.