De-indexed Pages on Ecom Site

[brainstorm1]

Hey guys,

I've been putting together an ecommerce site with a decent amount of content. I have tier 1 content that will act as essentially landing pages for major keywords. Then I have 1-5 tier 2 articles that are shorter and pointed to the tier 1 articles. It is aggressive because it is just interlinking on-site. No off-site backlinks just yet.

I noticed my indexed pages went up to 80 and they have fallen back down to 67. I'm wondering what may have happened for these pages to be de-indexed? The content is all the same / similar topic so do you all think it might be too close to duplicate content?

Also, part of my strategy is to syndicate the content from the site onto other outlets like Blogger, Wordpress (free site), and Tumblr. They are automatically syndicated so the duplicate content would be on those sites for sure. Bad idea?

Love to hear your thoughts.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Content too similar.

 

[BHopkins]

I noticed my indexed pages went up to 80 and they have fallen back down to 67. I'm wondering what may have happened for these pages to be de-indexed?

Did the pages change ranking or get deindexed?

 

[brainstorm1]

Did the pages change ranking or get deindexed?

They got de-indexed. Think it would work for me to go through manually and figure out which pages are similar and change / add to them?

Does the syndication via Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr come into effect at all or am I okay with that? It's just 1 for each and they all just point to the main content on the site.

 

[innosoft]

if content is same then it will de-index.

 

[brainstorm1]

It isn't the SAME, though. It's just similar. I guess even similar can cause problems so I'll have to go back and re-work perhaps.

Also, when I type site:"domain.com" in Google I get 224 results, but it only goes to 155 results with "click to see rest omitted". Then it only goes up to 189 results. So it looks like a lot of pages are being omitted but it is above the 67 WMT picked up.

This is too bizarre, but I suspect it just requires I go through to change up content a bit.

 

[BHopkins]

What you're looking at doesn't matter. Who cares if the pages are indexed? All that matters is that your target pages are ranking. I think too often people get stuck trying to figure things out like this when they could be spending that time writing content, optimizing landing pages or generating more traffic. Work towards the big goal of generating a profit, don't get sucked in by the inconsequential things.

 

[wizard04]

I have personally noticed, sometimes Google de-index few pages then after a few weeks index them again.

 

[brainstorm1]

What you're looking at doesn't matter. Who cares if the pages are indexed? All that matters is that your target pages are ranking. I think too often people get stuck trying to figure things out like this when they could be spending that time writing content, optimizing landing pages or generating more traffic. Work towards the big goal of generating a profit, don't get sucked in by the inconsequential things.

Good call. I do use it as an indicator to perform better on the tier 2 content pointing upwards, though. I don't want Google to give me bad marks for this and I'm not ranking for anything because it is a new site.

I'll take this advice and not get too worked up about it, though. Thanks Brandon - always a pleasure.

 

[darkseas]

Yes, you need content on different pages to be significantly different from one another.

 

[iggypop]

I'm wondering what the "significantly different" term really means, in this context. If you're using basic silo architecture, for example, and you're actually providing value by doing the "types of blue m&ms", "types of brown m&ms" thing, there's an audience searching for each of those. Now, each of those pages can't possibly be that significantly different from each other because of the narrow subject matter, but under the umbrella of the silo they should all work together and independently of each other. Those looking for nothing but info on blue m&m's will get everything they want and nothing they don't. I think this is where a lot of people get confused about how many levels deep to go.

 

[sergey007]

The problem is definitely in your content. Make it unique and the pages will get indexed back.