Google index dropping?

[Ringo Star]

Greetings,

My website had dropped index from 1.5 million pages indexed to about 150,000 pages in the past 4 days. Is there an update taking place? Are we banned? I hope not and pretty sure that we are working within the google guidelines. Please advise.

Yours truely,

Dave

[aquiss]

Hi Dave,

I'm seeing the exact same thing. 1 site we look after has dropped from 15,000 pages to just 48

[aquiss]

We me now down to 3 pages, yet yahoo and MSN have pretty much got the site.

Google it's getting boring now!

[gobeyond]

Since the BigDaddy was rolled out, many good pages either got dropped or ended up in their 'supplemental index". At the same time, Google's search results are becoming more and more irrelevant these days, especially when it comes to local searches. If you do a local search for service type of companies, the returned results are often loaded with .gov, .edu, or .org sites. I know Google is trying to sell more ads, but the uselessness of the natural search results is becoming more obvious.

[bob jones]

I have seen a significant drop in my indexed pages as well. It all started for me last Saturday on 5/20 when I noticed a big drop in my google traffic. Every since BigDaddy Google has been a complete mess.

[Wilksy]

Dave,

Can you tell us more about your site? Not specifics, but tell us about your pages, what cms or similar (if applicable) you use, tell us about your backlinks. How old is your site? Then we might be able to help.

Cheers!

[Wilksy]

aquiss, nice site btw. You dabbling in quite a compeditive market, I'd suggest you start targeting some niches within your site and working specifically on them building some quality links until you get a segment ranking well, then rinse and repeat on the next chunk.

It's hard with such a large site, but you should have a clear goal on the way forward, including having a good look at sites in your niche and why they are ranking. Where do their links come from? how is their content structured?

Do some snooping about and try a few things.. You need more deeplinks - topical and with good anchor text.

Good luck with it.

- gobeyond,

Do you remember the results of that sector in the last search engine of the day? Are they really worse?

[aquiss]

Originally Posted by Wilksy

aquiss, nice site btw. You dabbling in quite a compeditive market, I'd suggest you start targeting some niches within your site and working specifically on them building some quality links until you get a segment ranking well, then rinse and repeat on the next chunk.

It's hard with such a large site, but you should have a clear goal on the way forward, including having a good look at sites in your niche and why they are ranking. Where do their links come from? how is their content structured?

Do some snooping about and try a few things.. You need more deeplinks - topical and with good anchor text.

Good luck with it.

- gobeyond,

Do you remember the results of that sector in the last search engine of the day? Are they really worse?

LOL. We not exactly dabbling, we are one of the UK top 30 distribution companies. We also aware that hundreds of pages were linking to us, they also have dropped to just a few.

Niches or not, there is no reason for loosing all our pages, every page is a niche, correctly focused and to its unqiue points. We have other sites and while some have lost pages, and built on the same design structure, are still in place.

With all due respect, most of your comments we have already done, and do on a regular basis. The fact remains the pages have gone. This morning the pages have gone back upto 39, but google is listed very old content

[Wilksy]

Originally Posted by aquiss

LOL. We not exactly dabbling, we are one of the UK top 30 distribution companies. We also aware that hundreds of pages were linking to us, they also have dropped to just a few.

Niches or not, there is no reason for loosing all our pages, every page is a niche, correctly focused and to its unqiue points. We have other sites and while some have lost pages, and built on the same design structure, are still in place.

With all due respect, most of your comments we have already done, and do on a regular basis. The fact remains the pages have gone. This morning the pages have gone back upto 39, but google is listed very old content

Since you are doing so well I cannot see the reason why you would post - remembering this is a Google forum in a SEO/SEM site, tell me your in the top 30 websites in your niche and you may have a point. I cannot see your website ranking anywhere, nor can I understand why you would be rude to someone offering you help (hehe, for nothing).

Google lists old content because they have LINKS - something you need to research and implement properly. You could hire a SEO consultant, but I suspect you already know it all and will get all the rankings you deserve.

[aquiss]

Originally Posted by Wilksy

Since you are doing so well I cannot see the reason why you would post - remembering this is a Google forum in a SEO/SEM site, tell me your in the top 30 websites in your niche and you may have a point. I cannot see your website ranking anywhere, nor can I understand why you would be rude to someone offering you help (hehe, for nothing).

Google lists old content because they have LINKS - something you need to research and implement properly. You could hire a SEO consultant, but I suspect you already know it all and will get all the rankings you deserve.

No one is being rude, and I apologise if I have offended you in anyway. I just clearly pointed out respectfully that what you saying is not the case, for us anyway. When listed the site ranks nicely, a good 25% of the sites pages are in the top 3 pages for the keywords/terms, which in your words for a competitive market is good.

This is not a case of SEO (though SEM yes maybe), rather a concern that why a site has been dropped, almost 99.9% of it anayway, as per the subject title.

[glengara]

Indications are indexing may now depend on linkage pattern, too many ROS links from client sites maybe?

[PhilC]

Wilksy - I didn't see any rudeness - I saw someone correcting an assumption, and doing it very nicely imo, but that's all.

aquiss, and everyone who has had their pages dropped from Google's index - have a read of this:-

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

It will probably explain it all for you. A very large number of sites are in the same boat.

As glengara said, it's likely that the site's linkage patterns are the cause of the dropped pages; e.g. too many reciprocals, unwanted (by Google) OBLs, off-topic IBLs, etc. Matt mentions a number of things to do with links that can now cause a site to be limited in the number of pages that it can have in the index.

There's a bit of good news though. I watched one site while its indexed pages dropped over 100k, but it is now climbing back up again. It's still early days of the climb, but in the last few days 10k pages have been added. On the other hand, I watch another site that plummeted and hasn't started to recover.

[glengara]

Phil, that site that's coming back, have you noticed any linkage clean-up?

Despite MCs' post, my jury is still out on just how much dubious linkage has a bearing on this fairly widespread indexing problem....

[PhilC]

The site was very heavy with reciprocals, even though they were on-topic, and part of the natural functioning of the site. But that was changed, so that none of them are left. But the change was done only a day or two before the turn-around began, so I doubt that it could have made the difference, although it's possible, I suppose. I don't have any data as to which pages were spidered, and when, so I don't know if Google has been getting the pages where the reciprocals have been taken out. They may have been, and they may have been re-evaluating the site virtually on-the-fly.

[glengara]

Seems a bit of a coincidence.....

[aquiss]

Well me back upto 5500 pages.....progress