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
-
Top Landing Page has disappeared from Google Search Console but still shows at the top of Google
Hi, One of the top landing pages in my website has disappeared from GSC Search Analytics results. But I do get a good traffic from that page until now. What might be the reason for GSC to stop showing it on the results?
Technical SEO | | eduapps0 -
Is the Google results serp broken?
Hi everyone! We've been trying to decipher how many of our pages are indexed by google at the moment. If we do the usual "site:https://www.hobbydb.com" search term, the serp says that we have more than 740,000 pages indexed. However, when I do a deep dive and click through to the last page of results, I can only get to page 54, and then there are no more results. This would mean that I only have 540 pages indexed, not 740,000. We have also done other queries for other sub-sections of our website, and the results also truncate at 50 pages. Has anyone run into this problem? Any suggestions are appreciated! Best, Alex
Technical SEO | | mpchobbydb0 -
My Home Page meta title on Google isn't what it should be
Hey guys My website is http://www.oxfordmeetsfifth.com According to SEOcentro, my website should appear to Google as Fashion Tips for Women | Oxford Meets Fifth. I have used the Yoast plugin and force rewrote titles to ensure that is the home page meta title. It also appears correctly in browser. Could anyone advise why this is the case? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | OxfordMeetsFifth0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Is the Authority of Individual Pages Diluted When You Add New Pages?
I was wondering if the authority of individual pages is diluted when you add new pages (in Google's view). Suppose your site had 100 pages and you added 100 new pages (without getting any new links). Would the average authority of the original pages significantly decrease and result in a drop in search traffic to the original pages? Do you worry that adding more pages will hurt pages that were previously published?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Google Alerts almost never alerts me to my own pages being added.
Hello All, So i have a fairly decent blog http://www.symbolphoto.com/bl*g/ * replace with o. However, i'm posting to it once/twice a week and i never ever see in my google alerts my pages being included. I do include my search terms in my pages "Bston Wedding Photgrapher" yet, my page is never included. What on earth am i doing wrong? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! -Brendan
Technical SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Google indexing page with description
Hello, We rank fairly high for a lot of terms but Google is not indexing our descriptions properly. An example is with "arnold schwarzenegger net worth". http://www.google.ca/search?q=arnold+schwarzenegger+net+worth&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a When we add content, we throw up a placeholder page first. The content gets added with no body content and the page only contains the net worth amount of the celebrity. We then go back through and re-add the descriptions and profile bio shortly after. Will that affect how the pages are getting indexed and is there a way we can get Google to go back to the page and try to index the description so it doesn't just appear as a straight link? Thanks, Alex
Technical SEO | | Anti-Alex0 -
Existing Pages in Google Index and Changing URLs
Hi!! I am launching a newly recoded site this week and had a another noobie question. The URL structure has changed slightly and I have installed a 301 redirect to take care of that. I am wondering how Google will handle my "old" pages? Will they just fall out of the index? Or does the 301 redirect tell Google to rewrite the URLs in the index? I am just concerned I may see an "old" page and a "new" page with the same content in the index. Just want to make sure I have covered all my bases. Thanks!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0