Big Reduction of Pages Indexed on Google

[gcmorris]

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This is posting to raise the issue of Google deciding to suddenly reduce the number of pages indexed on a web site. This has just happened to me with www.admax.co.uk where the pages indexed fell from more than 200 to less than 10 overnight. There also seems to be an impact on the ranking of the site as well. The result of this is the hits on AdMax had reduced significantly. I know that many other sites have also recently been impacted by this as well, but I have not seen much visibility of this in this forum.

I have read through the details on Google to get some pointers on the reasons for the problem. The main problem I have is that I can and have spent a lot of time and money to rectify the problem, but it is not clear to me exactly what the problem could be. This is very frustrating! My current thoughts on the potential cures to this problem are :-

1) Reduce the number of links on any one web page
2) Reduce the number of links to dead web sites
3) Increase the ratio of text to links
4) Consider carefully the quality and relevance of sites linked to and linked from.

I will be interested to hear of other people's experience of being un-Googled and how they got round the problem.

On a different note, my recent experience is that MSN has improved a lot recently. I find that MSN indexes new pages and new sites a lot quicker than Google. If this trend carries on, MSN could threaten the position of Google as the leading search engine. I am starting to use MSN more and more, partly due to the fact that I believe that I and many other web site owners are being treated badly by Google.


Graham
AdMax UK and Ireland Directory
www.admax.co.uk

[pricethat]

On a different note, my recent experience is that MSN has improved a lot recently. I find that MSN indexes new pages and new sites a lot quicker than Google. If this trend carries on, MSN could threaten the position of Google as the leading search engine. I am starting to use MSN more and more, partly due to the fact that I believe that I and many other web site owners are being treated badly by Google.

Treated bad by google? They never promised anything to you in the first place for you to come up with this idea.

But i am interested in your comment with regards to MSN improving, in what way do you define an improvement? The fact that they crawl your website and you have many more pages indexed in it? Please.........

Google index very regular the sites that it deems are worthwhile to its users, sites that are not and with very little changing content are not. Simple as that. My site too has gone from 150,000 pages indexed to just short of 500 according to the results when i search and quite rightly so, my site is just full of junk and google sussed it out.

My suggestion to you is that if MSN are including more of your pages and mine where google are not then it is actually a very clear sign that MSN are not improving at all. There is obviously a reason why google removed them (if in fact they did and it is not just a google dance). Are reason that MSN fail to pick up on.

Back to facts now, google still index more pages than any other search engine and google provide probably 80% of the traffic compared to any other search engine. Now without sounding too harsh both your site and a few of mine really do not add very much value to the net at all, its a directory site like the many thousands of others out there. I personally if designing a search engine algorythm would not pay too much attention to your site, or mine for that matter. I am very suprised that it took google any length of time to disregard "another" directory site.

MSN happens to be from my experience the easiest search engine to manipulate and therefore spam. Having limited seo skills i can whack up any old crap and msn will show it. That is improvement?

[ian]

One of my directory sites also took a hammering, and the only pages that remain are those with decent inbound links. Google's latest 'tweak' has filtered out lots of low quality pages, so as I see it your options are:

- get some decent content and inbound links and hope Google likes them
- live off what Yahoo / MSN send you
- get into the PPC game. If your site is good enough and coverts well, you'll turn the ppc visitors into a +ve cashflow.

That said, google has added a few of my dropped pages back in recently.

Good luck

[deano6410]

There are thousands of posts on this on the net & I have been warning a4u members for a long time regarding link swapping.

Google is now HEAVILY devaluing reciprocal links. If the majority of your backlinks are from link swaps then you will start to lose your ranking, you will be crawled less and you will lose cached pages.

One of my directory sites also took a hammering

Directory sites rely SOLEY on recips, therefore many directories are being hit hard right now.

Do link swaps ONLY with the top 10 sites in your industry from now on, to get your cached pages back you need to get some more one-way links.

[goforbroke]

Went down from 11,000 pages listed to 2 in one night on Google. That was a fair few weeks ago. However, Googlebot has shifted through over 19,000 in the last month, so I am just hanging on in there to see if any of these get through into the index. I have recently moved server (and URL) of my main site and had all the old pages redirecting to the new ones, and this seemed to get the new pages into the index quickly. But, the old site (and redirection pages) have now gone and I'm solely reliant on the new pages doing all the work. I'll give it until the end of June, and if there is no improvement, I'll have to reconsider my options.

[Brendon]

Think about 4)

BigDaddy has had a huge effect on G's perception of link quality. The best advice is to study the current top 10 for the phrases you want, see what they are doing, and then do it better

[markzz]

they did actually have some indexing problems. they said you can do a re-inclusion request. but rightly said, linking priorities have changed.

Google indexing problems

[getvisible]

Treated bad by google? They never promised anything to you in the first place for you to come up with this idea.

But i am interested in your comment with regards to MSN improving, in what way do you define an improvement? The fact that they crawl your website and you have many more pages indexed in it? Please.........

take a chill pill man.

I completely agree with ian.

[bapages]

I enquired to Goolge about this on Friday and was advised that they are having some server issues that have affected PR and indexing and is only a temporary glitch

[Bubb1es]

I'm a member of searchenginenews.com, and they have recently said that Google is experiencing problems with Big Daddy. They also mentioned that Google is possibly stamping down on sites linking to poor websites and/or having duplicate content.

[Mogga]

Looking for some links for a clothing site this week I've used google to look for them. And to be honest I've not been impressed with the ones google's listed.


The first one I found (And I'm not putting names in) wants a recip link. But the search on the site doesn't search that directory it goes off elsewhere.

The second one doesn't have any unique content other than links and has affil ads aplenty.

Google's own version of DMOZ shows up next which is fair enough - (Although I'm wondering if one of the sites in there is the cat editors as its a bit out of place imo)

At no. 10 is a bizarre blog. Interesting but not the most relevant thing imo.


deano6410 - "top 10 sites" by who's definition? Google? By traffic volume?

[Sandis]

This is quite common problem for many sites that have any significant number of pages.

You might want to check these 2 urls:

Big Daddy explained:
http://www.site-reference.com/articl...Big-Daddy.html

And some ideas why pages get's reduced:
http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/superfi...eo-strategies/

Hope this helps!

[Markw]

I had the same problem and i deleted my Google site map and my pages appear to slowly indexed again

[Brendon]

That sounds more like a problem with the sitemap. I believe that G introduded some funky debug utilities for Sitemaps... I'm sure I saw something on MC's blog about this a while back. Anyone using it?

[purple]

I will do some research on sites with google sitemap and with out but top of my head my best crawled sites are ones WITHOUT google sitemap