GSC indexing report is back after 3 weeks frozen. Is your REAL indexed count down?

GSC's page indexing report just refreshed after sitting frozen on June 11 for about three weeks. Now that people can see their graphs again, two things are landing at once:

• indexed-page counts stepping down over June
• spikes in the not-indexed buckets (crawled not indexed, 404, blocked by robots)

Google's line is that the bucket spikes are finer-grained reporting, "not a change in the processing of websites". Maybe. But the quiet de-indexing trend has been in the news for a couple of months now, and a three week reporting blackout followed by a step down is a great way to make everyone discover it on the same morning.

So, question for the room, and answer with data not vibes: have you checked your indexed counts against anything other than the report? URL inspection on your money pages, log files, or plain old traffic to deep pages tells you whether the drop is real on YOUR site. Curious what people are actually seeing -> real de-indexing, or a dashboard jump scare.

you should avoid judging it based on the indexing report alone. Check your important pages with URL Inspection, compare organic traffic, and review server logs if you have them. If those all look stable, it's probably better to wait a bit before making major changes based on the report alone.

I think it was the opposite. I just built a website with 3k+ pages right in the middle of the update....got 1.05k pages indexed in 1 go.

Habib-SEO said:

no evidence of widespread de-indexing yet

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That's two for two then, @ads studio landed in the same place -> checked beyond the dashboard, found a reporting change, not a purge. Exactly the kind of answer I was fishing for, thanks both. Keep the URL-inspection and log checks coming, the sample is still small.

FatBlackCat said:

got 1.05k pages indexed in 1 go

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Now this is the interesting one. A brand-new 3k page site swallowing 1.05k URLs in one gulp mid-update cuts straight against the rationing story. What's the niche and content type, and where are the other 2k sitting -> Discovered, or Crawled currently not indexed? If fresh sites are getting thousand-page intakes while older sites step down on paper, that reads like re-scoring, not shrinking capacity.

Hetneo said:

That's two for two then, @ads studio landed in the same place -> checked beyond the dashboard, found a reporting change, not a purge. Exactly the kind of answer I was fishing for, thanks both. Keep the URL-inspection and log checks coming, the sample is still small.


Now this is the interesting one. A brand-new 3k page site swallowing 1.05k URLs in one gulp mid-update cuts straight against the rationing story. What's the niche and content type, and where are the other 2k sitting -> Discovered, or Crawled currently not indexed? If fresh sites are getting thousand-page intakes while older sites step down on paper, that reads like re-scoring, not shrinking capacity.

Click to expand...

The niche is Online Therapy and the content is batch generated. The other 2.5k are discovered currently not indexed.

FatBlackCat said:

The other 2.5k are discovered currently not indexed

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Online therapy plus batch content is about the spiciest combo you could have picked to test this with -> YMYL niche, generated pages, launched mid-update. And the split you got is textbook two-gate behaviour:

• Gate one is crawl scheduling. Google took a 1.05k bite because the site is new and it wanted a sample. The 2.5k sitting in Discovered - currently not indexed means it hasn't even spent crawl budget on them yet. It's waiting to see how the sample performs.
• Gate two is the re-score. The 1.05k aren't "in", they're on a lease. Over the next 2-3 weeks Google grades what the sample earns (impressions, clicks, and in a YMYL niche, whether anything vouches for the entity behind it) and either extends the lease to the rest of the queue or quietly walks the 1.05k back down.

So I'd argue your data point doesn't contradict the rationing story, it IS the rationing story seen from the intake side. New site gets a fast sample, old sites get re-graded at renewal. Same machine, different door.

If you're up for it: note your indexed count today and check it again around July 20. If the 1.05k held or grew, that's a genuinely useful signal for everyone here (and frankly impressive for batch content in therapy). If it stepped down to a few hundred, we all watched a lease expire in real time. Either way report back, this thread runs on data not vibes.