Site went from 1,600 indexed to 5 in 13 weeks no manual action, no security issues. What am I missing?

Looking for fresh eyes on this. A multilingual site I manage has been getting steadily deindexed since mid-February. Started at ~1,640 indexed pages, dropped progressively week over week, and is now sitting at 5 indexed pages. No manual action, no security issues in Search Console, no DMCA, no algorithm update I can pin it to. Just a slow, steady bleed.

Pulling the Pages report breakdown:

• Crawled — currently not indexed: ~33,300
• Excluded by 'noindex' tag: ~2,300
• Server error (5xx): ~1,400
• Not found (404): ~1,500
• Page with redirect: ~750
• Alternate page with proper canonical: ~385
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical: ~520
  

Total URLs Google has discovered: ~40,500. Sitemap submits 94.

Who have an idea what to check?

if I had to investigate first, I’d focus heavily on server reliability, canonical consistency, and thin/duplicate multilingual pages.
40k discovered URLs with only 94 sitemap URLs also suggests Google may be finding parameter, faceted, or duplicate URL variations somewhere.
once crawl efficiency drops badly enough, Google sometimes starts aggressively pruning indexed pages even without a manual action.

tried to scan all with AI tools didnt found any thing...

Alexbis69 said:

Looking for fresh eyes on this. A multilingual site I manage has been getting steadily deindexed since mid-February. Started at ~1,640 indexed pages, dropped progressively week over week, and is now sitting at 5 indexed pages. No manual action, no security issues in Search Console, no DMCA, no algorithm update I can pin it to. Just a slow, steady bleed.

Pulling the Pages report breakdown:

• Crawled — currently not indexed: ~33,300
• Excluded by 'noindex' tag: ~2,300
• Server error (5xx): ~1,400
• Not found (404): ~1,500
• Page with redirect: ~750
• Alternate page with proper canonical: ~385
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical: ~520

Total URLs Google has discovered: ~40,500. Sitemap submits 94.

Who have an idea what to check?

Click to expand...

A drop from 1,600 indexed pages to only 5, without a manual action or security warning in Google, usually means an algorithmic quality or crawl trust collapse, not a technical penalty.

With that many crawled but not indexed pages, server errors, and redirects, it's clear google's having a hard time understanding and trusting your site, so maybe try cleaning up your site's technical issues

What's your platform? Wordpress? or you use your own CMS?

JoyGlobals said:

With that many crawled but not indexed pages, server errors, and redirects, it's clear google's having a hard time understanding and trusting your site, so maybe try cleaning up your site's technical issues

What's your platform? Wordpress? or you use your own CMS?

Click to expand...

custom, Umbraco

Fix server errors and reduce duplicate/low-value URLs so Google can trust and re-index your site again.

Check your server logs and thin content on those multilingual pages because that high 'Crawled - currently not indexed' count suggests a massive quality or crawl budget issue.

That kind of steady drop usually points more to technical/indexing trust issues than content quality.

ads studio said:

That kind of steady drop usually points more to technical/indexing trust issues than content quality.

Click to expand...

that's clear but how to find it?

MysticTurnip said:

Check your server logs and thin content on those multilingual pages because that high 'Crawled - currently not indexed' count suggests a massive quality or crawl budget issue.

Click to expand...

what should I look in the logs?

Alexbis69 said:

Looking for fresh eyes on this. A multilingual site I manage has been getting steadily deindexed since mid-February. Started at ~1,640 indexed pages, dropped progressively week over week, and is now sitting at 5 indexed pages. No manual action, no security issues in Search Console, no DMCA, no algorithm update I can pin it to. Just a slow, steady bleed.

Pulling the Pages report breakdown:

• Crawled — currently not indexed: ~33,300
• Excluded by 'noindex' tag: ~2,300
• Server error (5xx): ~1,400
• Not found (404): ~1,500
• Page with redirect: ~750
• Alternate page with proper canonical: ~385
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical: ~520

Total URLs Google has discovered: ~40,500. Sitemap submits 94.

Who have an idea what to check?

Click to expand...

got an email like that from google day, any one know why it happens?
Thank you for your response and for sharing the detailed security review of your landing page and domain. We appreciate the technical depth you provided regarding your scripts, server security, and verification processes.


Following your request, our specialist teams have performed a manual re-review of your domain. After a comprehensive assessment, the domain continues to show a violation of our safety policies. This classification is based on a holistic evaluation of the site's intent and its alignment with our security requirements for a safe browsing experience.


Because of these findings, the current domain is not eligible for re-enabling. To protect the integrity of our detection systems, we are unable to provide further specific technical markers or internal data points regarding this decision.


Since we are unable to enable the current domain at this time, we suggest considering the use of a new, separate domain for your advertising efforts. A fresh domain that is fully compliant with all Google Ads policies should help in establishing a secure presence on our platform.


We recommend reviewing the Google Ads Policy Center to ensure any new landing pages meet the necessary safety and transparency standards.


Thank you for your understanding and for your commitment to maintaining a safe advertising ecosystem.

CharlotteMia said:

• When indexed pages fall from 1,600 to just 5 with no manual penalty reported, it typically suggests that Google’s algorithms have reassessed the site’s quality or crawl reliability.
• A major indexing collapse without security alerts often points toward broader trust and quality concerns instead of a purely technical issue.
• If Google quietly removes most indexed pages, the issue is commonly tied to content value, crawl efficiency, or overall site credibility.

Click to expand...

that's clear, how to find what they detected...?

A drop that large usually points to technical crawling or indexing problems more than a normal algorithm update. I would first check server stability, crawl budget issues, robots.txt rules, hreflang setup, canonicals, and whether Google is seeing thin or duplicate content across language versions. The high “crawled currently not indexed” and 5xx errors are probably major warning signs here.

It seems like there are several issues with your content and server. Google is finding your website unreliable to index. So, they crawled but didn't index most of the pages. You need to check the details to see which pages didn't get indexed and try to fix any issues with them. Do it for all errors and let Google recrawl your website.

2-month-old video site: 2,000+ URLs discovered but almost no video pages indexed — technical issue or content quality?

The thing I'd chase first is the 1,400 server errors, not the quality question. Everyone's telling you it's a trust thing, and maybe it is, but "trust" isn't something you can go and look at. 5xx is.

Pull raw server logs for Googlebot only, a couple of weeks of them, and group by status code and URL pattern. What you're looking for is whether the 5xx cluster on one path (a language folder, a parameterised route) and whether they line up with the weeks the index count fell. If Googlebot was hitting errors at scale while crawling, dropping pages is the expected response, no penalty needed.

The 40,500 discovered against 94 in the sitemap is the other half of it. Something is generating URLs. On a multilingual Umbraco build that's usually culture or hreflang variants being emitted as separate crawlable paths. The logs will show you the shape of them faster than any crawler will.

Also worth checking what the 2,300 noindex pages actually are. If something flipped a template-level tag in February that would explain the timing.

Did the drop start on a deploy date, out of interest? That narrows it a lot.