Drop in Google Pages Indexed on Site

[Guy Peeke-Vout]

Our site http://www.stitch1knit1.com has been running for about 6 years and until recently we had 5,000 plus pages in the Google index. However, over the past week we have noticed an alarming drop in this number, earlier this week we were down to only 1500 pages and tonight 1300.

I would be really grateful for any suggestions as to how we can reverse this trend and if there are any detrimental issues with our site that we should be aware of.

Thanks for your help.

[RuralWeb]

The immediate thing that stands out for me is the excessively long urls you have created. This is considered SPAM by big G and may be part of the reason if all your pages are like this.

[grantglendinnin]

Okay, I know Actinic's not exactly html valid - but that's quite bad - do your best to clean that up without breaking anything.

Further to that - I'd also agree with Malcolm - the majority of your links are pretty keyword-stuffed.

Get your site as error-free as you can...Google does drop pages if it attempts to crawl and hits a stumbling block every time. The <title> tag in the title probably doesn't help - not sure if it will harm you either, though

[Guy Peeke-Vout]

Thanks for the replies.

I take your point about the HTML, it's something we need to get around to tidying up. It's one of things where the pages work so you tend to think if it aint broke ...

The new pages we are uploading use shorter more concise urls. The older longer urls go back to earlier versions of the site, as these URLS were indexed by Google we decided not to change them. I guess we might as well rename the urls that have been dropped and see if this improves matters.

Strangely having looked at the number of visitor referrals we are receiving from Google it is more or less the same as last year.

[RuralWeb]

It also depends on which data center you are looking at - Ive seen a few sites drop off recently but pick back up a few month later. As you say traffic changed little during that time and thats the important bit - if traffic had dropped as well then you have a real problem

[Guy Peeke-Vout]

I have checked the UK and USA index and they are both more or less the same. The UK index is about 200 pages fewer but it has always been lower then the USA index.