: Huge drop in indexed pages Possible Duplicate: Why the # of indexed pages got dicreased? My site's indexed pages drop every now and then. It suddenly drops from ~800.000 to ~20.000

@Harper822

You said:


I happens in both site:www.example.com and example.com. I'm very worried and I can't figure out why is this happening without making any changes in the site's link structure.


you have to site: example.com and example.com I think the problem is that google has recognized two different sites with the same content.

You should redirect example.com to example.com In search results all the example.com pages should be gone.

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@Cofer257

Using the site: operator is almost useless for gauging how much Google is indexing your site; that's not what it's meant for.

To find out how many pages Google actually has indexed you'll need to register for Google Webmaster Tools and view data there. If you submit a sitemap it tells you how many of the URLs in the sitemap it has indexed.

You should also check your robots.txt file. You need a gap between separate rule groups, ie before the Google-Mediapartners rule and before the * rule. Otherwise all use agents will think every rule in the file only applies to Twiceler.

Furthermore, your last list of disallows looks like a misguided attempt to avoid duplicate content woes. Those should be instead fixed using canonical URLs.

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