: What was the "data dip" that Google reports for webmaster tools data on May 15th, 2016? The Google Webmaster panel index says: Update: As of 5/14/16, Index Status data precisely reflects

@Berumen354

As has been stated in the comments above Google treats sites differently based on protocol as well as if they have different sub domains (including www and non www sites). what this means is that...
example.com example.com www.example.com www.example.com some-other-sub.example.com
Are all treated as different sites for crawling and indexing purposes.

As a side note there was an unconfirmed update to Google's algorithm on the 10th May 2016, an update I add that Google has not announced or confirmed either, and so this error may have been due to that update as well. The message appears to have hit many other users as well around the same date.

Due to Google's lack of details on this incident there is no real way to know for certain if this was a temporary bug or if this was due to a change in the indexing algorithm. If it was a temporary bug then I would expect your sites index to return to normal, if not then chances are it has been adjusted by an algorithm change.

Additionally I note from your comment that you have canonical links on your site. You should ensure that your canonical links are an absolute URL not a relative path and that the root protocol and domain are the main ones that you want appearing in the Google index and that you want customers to access predominantly. In other words if you want the Google SERP to show your site as www.domain.com/whatever then you should make sure that all of your canonical links start with www.domain.com/.

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