Google dropping pages from SERPS
-
The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total.
When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000.
Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong?
Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk
-
I am fairly sure that Pagerank is now constantly updated, it may well be that they only adjust the visible pagerank every three months though.
I can only say this next bit speculatively because I don't have the data (I would love to see the periods and numbers for the site above), but the cap itself might be a somewhat fluid idea, pages may be retained in the index as they are discovered but get pared back to their "hard cap" periodically.
-
Yeah, good shout. I was thinking about that as well, and maybe something to do with switching or upgrading of data centers, but probably not the latter to this extent.
-
Seems unlikely he would drop 90% of indexed pages and regain them back soon after if it was a PR thing, don't you think? Aren't PR updates generally quarterly?
-
I think it could be down to an indexation cap. I know Pagerank is not the force it once was but it does play a role in the number of pages google retains in it's index (if they regularly cull sites back to their cap that might explain the fluctuation, or maybe you fluctuate between two thresholds).
Matt Cutts made some comments which Rand broke down into bitesize chunks in the SEOmoz blog to that effect:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-illustrated-guide-to-matt-cutts-comments-on-crawling-indexation
Your Pagerank is low, and without trawling through your site I don't know about duplicate content, but this could well be it. The fix is the same as an awful lot of SEO problems, more, better links.
-
I also think it's very possible his previous experiences with rankings dropping and pages getting de-indexed could have been at key algo udpates as well. Mayday, etc...
-
Yup David's point above is the prime suspect for a lot of changes just now, however you say this has happened before?
Are you doing anything else at the times when you've noticed you get dropped for a few days/weeks? Roughly how often does it happen?
EDIT - Just quickly put your site into OSE and you don't have a hugely diverse link profile, plus the sort of sites you're getting links from may have been effected by the farmer update which is had a knock on effect to your site (and similar updates may have done in the past). Not conclusive but something to think about as well.
-
The answer could easily be the Google Farmer update. If you are not familiar with this, read the latest post by Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers
That will help you understand the latest algorithm update and how you can do something about it.
It sounds like you dropped off due to the algo update and that leads me to believe that Google thought your content was not high enough quality?
I would read Rand's post, evaluate your website, and then have the content analyzed and see if you need to hire a really good writer to build high quality content that is valuable to the users. If you were building mediocre content to target thousands of keywords, specifically long-tail, you need to revamp that strategy and focus on amazing content first!
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my inner pages ranking higher than main page?
Hi everyone, for some reason lately i have discovered that Google is ranking my inner pages higher than the main subfolder page. www.domain.com/subfolder --> Target page to be ranked
Technical SEO | | davidboh
www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus ---> page that is currently ranking Also in the SERP most of the time, it is showing both links in this manner. www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus
-----------www.domain.com/subfolder Thanks in advance.1 -
Google indexes page elements
Hello We face this problem that Google indexes page elements from WordPress as single pages. How can we prevent these elements from being indexed separately and being displayed in the search results? For example this project: www.rovana.be When scrolling down the search results, there are a lot of elements that are indexed separately. When clicking on the link, this is wat we see (see attachements) Does anyone have experience with this way of indexing and how can we solve this problem? Thanks! LlAWG4w.png C7XDDYS.png gVroomx.png
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do. The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again. When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search. Any ideas? [see images where you can see the problem] XTrDn 2doHF
Technical SEO | | robk1230 -
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
Is There Google 6th page penalty?
My site have keyword domain but my page doesnt up or down at 6th page on search results. And my main page doesnt show 6th page too my alt pages. So what can i do for this penaly? Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | iddaasonuclari0 -
Missing meta descriptions from Google SERPs
Hullo all, I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully. Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs. Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap! Thank you in advance! aE9RKXJ
Technical SEO | | suchde0 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
Can I use canonical tags to merge property map pages and availability pages to their counterpart overview pages?
I have a property website, for each property are 4-5 tabs each with their own URL, these pages include the overview page which is content rich, and auxilliary pages such as maps, availability, can I use a canonical tag to merge the tabs with very little content to their corresponding overview page which is content rich? I.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview This page has tabs for map, town info, availability which all have their own url i.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/map
Technical SEO | | assertive-media
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/towninfo Because these auxilary pages do not contain much content can I place a canonical tag in them pointing back to the content rich overview page at www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview?0