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
-
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Moving Some Content From Page A to Page B
Page A has written content, pictures, videos. The written content from Page A is being moved to Page B. When Google crawls the pages next time around will Page B receive the content credit? Will there not be any issues that this content originally belonged to Page A? Page A is not a page I want to rank for (just have great pictures and videos for users). Can I 301 redirect from Page A to B since the written content from A has been deleted or no need? Again, I intent to keep Page A live because good value for users to see pictures and videos.
Technical SEO | | khi50 -
When do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster?
Hi, I was wondering when and how often do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster and do you submit individual pages or main URL only? I've googled it but i got confused more. I appreciate if you could help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rubix1 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
Web page is showing up on Google but doesn't show when it was cached, so is it indexed?
Hey everyone So I created a new page on a WordPress website, it was live for a few hours till I changed my mind & switched it back to a draft. Just out of curiosity I did the Site:www.example.com/Example search on Google to see if it had been indexed & apparently it had but when I click on cached to see what time it got indexed at exactly it's showing me an error. So does this mean it is indexed or not?
Technical SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Page not Accesible for crawler in on-page report
Hi All, We started using SEOMoz this week and ran into an issue regarding the crawler access in the on-page report module. The attached screen shot shows that the HTTP status is 200 but SEOMoz still says that the page is not accessible for crawlers. What could this be? Page in question
Technical SEO | | TiasNimbas
http://www.tiasnimbas.edu/Executive_MBA/pgeId=307 Regards, Coen SEOMoz.png0 -
Will a drop in indexed pages significantly affect Google rankings?
I am doing some research into why we were bumped from Google's first page into the 3rd, fourth and fifth pages in June of 2010. I always suspected Caffeine, but I just came across some data that indicates a drop in indexed pages from 510 in January of that year to 133 by June. I'm not sure what happened but I believe our blog pages were de-indexed somehow. What I want to know is could that significant drop in indexed pages have had an effect on our rankings at that time? We are back up to over 500 indexed pages, but have not fully recovered our first page positions.
Technical SEO | | rdreich490 -
New page titles not updating in Google results even though recrawlled
I have updated the page title of a website - it's a top product page and very high authority (64 PA on a 63 DA). The page has been recrawlled and the cache updated - but the page tiltle in the Google snippet is still the same. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | OddDog0