Help needed - strange indexation issues

[Poplanu]

Hi guys,

I need help. I've been having weird indexation issues since June on a couple of pages that used to rank well.

The affected pages are not showing up in the SERPs at all for their target keyword. So it's not like they're on page 3 or page 5. They're completely out of the index.

Here's a screenshot - all affected pages look like this:

Now, 3 things happened in June and I don't know which one of them is to blame:

1. CWV 1st update
2. 301 redirected a domain, not the cleanest redirect
3. Moved the site to Generatepress theme

Starting with the redirect, I've disabled the homepage redirect in .htaccess and added a link to my main site's homepage instead. Submitted in GSC for reindexing. If this changes anything, then the culprit is clear.

Has anyone here seen or dealt with anything similar?

• No manual action
• Pages used to rank well
• No change in search intent
• Good, optimized content, could use an update but nothing warranting a drop out of the index
• Competitors ranking in top positions with worse content

Only some pages are affected - other are ranking fine, no problem, some even gaining in traffic. That's the weirdest part of the whole thing.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I don't think any of your 3 things mentioned above is to blame. Google seems to be having indexing issues again. Not the type where they're slow to index pages but the kind you describe where pages are dropping in and out of the index.

This page catalogs a lot of the talk about it. I don't think there's an answer or anything we can do to influence it. The first step is for Google to even acknowledge there's a problem, which is always the hardest step.

 

[Kaudo]

Does the screenshot represent just one affected page or the whole site?
Cause, to me it seems you are still getting some clicks even though just a fraction, that means something has to be in the index. How old is the site? Is the content somehow seasonal?

Just to be sure there are no technical issues,
1.) go to GSC - coverage report,
2.) include all the "bad" statuses -> "errors", "valid with errors" and "excluded"
3.) open them one by one, starting with e.g. "excluded/Crawled - currently not indexed"
use filter URL = your URL that dropped out of the index.
Are you able to find that dropped page somewhere? What is its status?

Do you see any trends in the graphs of the above "bad" statuses that somehow correlates with the dates when your page(s) dropped out of the index?

 

[Poplanu]

Does the screenshot represent just one affected page or the whole site?

I actually just went through all pages one by one to map this. ~10 pages are affected, the rest are fine either stable or growing. Some of those 10 are too small to care about, but there are 3-4 that I need to get back live for sure.

3.) open them one by one, starting with e.g. "excluded/Crawled - currently not indexed"

That's the thing, they're all "indexed" in GSC. But when you manually google for the keyword, they don't show up on the first 10 pages, even though before they used to hold positions 1-3. On-page optimized and all that shabazz.

Do you see any trends in the graphs of the above "bad" statuses that somehow correlates with the dates when your page(s) dropped out of the index?

June core update seems to have pushed 90% of them. You can even see it on the graph. Noticed a couple had this kind of pattern earlier, but they're smaller pages so I didn't care too much. But yeah June core update was the catalyst. Recovered some traffic in July, but not on pages affected by this issue.

I'll keep doing the kitchen sink stuff, content updates, some targeted links, EAT basics, etc. as well to try and get this back live. Will report back if anything moves the needle.

Edit: I'll use the force indexation feature on all of them, probably won't do much but shouldn't hurt either.

 

[Kaudo]

I believe that time solves this sometimes all you need to do is wait. I am new to this forum and don´t know what kitchen sink stuff means I´m gonna search it out