Since the beginning or mid October 2009, i’ve noticed that the number of indexed pages on one of my site has been decreasing dramatically. Just before that happened, i had around 600+ pages in Google index. I started losing 5-10 pages in the index everyday and i’m not really thrilled about it. As of today, i have roughly 450+ pages in the index. So i’ve lost nearly 150 webpages. The problem is that losing pages in the index means losing traffic and losing traffic is very bad.
It might have something to do with the Caffeine update and that Google is trying to get rid of unimportant pages or duplicate content. There are some pages on my site which don’t have a lot of content not because i wanted them to be short but because they are designed to be short. Now because there are a lot of pages on the site, i cannot link them all from the homepage. This means that some pages will somehow be very far from the homepage requiring quite a few clicks before you can actually see them.
There are a few things which i can do though. I can try to increase the content on these pages by displaying a list of related articles with a short description. Another way to overcome the problem is to acquire a few links to those pages which are not indexed. This will definitely make it appear as important in the eyes of google.
Once i’ve made the changes i’m thinking, i’m 90% sure that they’ll come back in the index.