Webmaster Tools, major drop in Index Status

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Webmaster Tools, major drop in Index Status

GoNC

9:52 pm on Aug 10, 2014 (gmt 0)

In March, Google indexed 3,207,696 pages, but then it dropped off to 1! From March 9 until today, it's only indexing 1 or 2 pages.

Everything in Webmaster Tools says that everything's fine, but there's no explanation of such a major change? The chart shows several years of indexing increasing, then a sudden drop to nothing.

Back in February, I did add a canonical tag, per the discussion and advise in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

That was about a month before this shift occurred, so the timing is close, but I don't see why it would have had a negative impact. I just checked, and the canonical tags are linking correctly; all they do is remove parameters that Google should have ignored, anyway.

I couldn't find any press releases about Google changing this section, so do you guys have any suggestions on why the sudden change?

lucy24

11:09 pm on Aug 10, 2014 (gmt 0)

From March 9 until today, it's only indexing 1 or 2 pages.

Is this based on information in GWT-- which is notoriously hiccupy-- or on exact-text searches for pages on your site?

phranque

5:03 am on Aug 11, 2014 (gmt 0)

is this a hostname canonicalization issue?
(e.g. www. vs non-www.)

have you tried a site:example.com search to see if anything is actually indexed for your domain?

have you tried "fetch as googlebot" in GWT to see if that exposes any clues?

GoNC

8:17 am on Aug 11, 2014 (gmt 0)

It's just based on GWT. I did a site:mysite.com search on Google and it does look like they've indexed newer pages, so I guess it's GWT? Unless this is an indicator of a future problem.

I'm 99% sure it's not a www vs non-www issue; I've redirected all pageviews to www via htaccess for 10 years or so.

"Fetch as Google" in GWT returns a "Complete", and "robots.txt Tester" says there are no errors or warnings. "Security Issues" also says there are no problems.

I would be tempted to say that this is just a bug on GWT, except that it started 5 months ago, right along with their update. It makes me worry that there's some minor detail wrong with my site that's going to impact the next Google update.