Member Avatar for Dani

Please help me! I seem to have fallen into a google slump. In April, the site was redone with a new navigation scheme. Soon after, the latest version of my mod_rewrite hack was applied, which changed around a bunch of the links. (More stuff was mod_rewritten than ever before). At the same time, I decided to take the plunge and buy some high PR sitewide links for the first time. (Up until now, I was all natural). However, the number of pages I have indexed has been steadily declining - from 250,000 to 150,000 in just a matter of weeks. What can I do to rectify this? Will it sort itself out on its own once Google gets a grip of my new site navigation and eliminates duplicate pages?

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Dani AI

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A short, practical add‑on to the thread started by , and to the patience noted by , and others: structural changes can trigger big index swings, but a few targeted technical controls will stop oscillation and speed recovery.

Recommended checklist (most urgent first): implement permanent (301) redirects from deprecated/variant URLs to a single preferred URL; and use rel="canonical" on any pages that can be reached in more than one way. These two signals are the cleanest way to consolidate duplicates and steer Google to the single representative URL. Example snippets:

<!-- canonical in the <head> of duplicate pages -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/preferred-page" />
# simple .htaccess permanent redirect
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^old-path/?$ https://example.com/new-path/ [R=301,L]

(developers.google.com)

Operational follow‑ups: publish an updated XML sitemap containing only canonical URLs and submit it in Google Search Console; use the URL Inspection tool to check representative pages and to request indexing where appropriate; monitor the Index Coverage report for entries like “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical” or crawl errors. Avoid hiding duplicates with robots.txt alone—canonical or redirects are the safer controls. (developers.google.com)

Link risk and cleanup: bought site‑wide links or other paid placements should be marked so they don’t pass ranking credit (rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow"); buying links for ranking is covered by Google’s link‑spam rules and can cause manual or algorithmic actions. If a manual “unnatural links” action appears, follow Google’s removal guidance and only then consider a Disavow submission; the disavow tool is a last resort, not a first step. (developers.google.com)

Monitoring note: index counts can swing while Google re‑clusters canonicals and re‑crawls. Server logs, crawl‑stats in Search Console and the URL Inspection details are the authoritative diagnostic sources (not a raw site: query). Combining the technical fixes above with steady monitoring typically ends the “slump” as crawls settle. (developers.google.com)

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Member Avatar for Antonbomb22

google will eventually catch on to the redesign and unindex the indexed pages once it realizes they dont exist anymore. it also will eventually adapt to the new setup. you have to give google time to catch on;)

Member Avatar for Dani

Well here's the thing. It's not that there are pages in its index that don't exist anymore. It's just that I've been playing around with mod_rewrite so much that it has valid URLs that I simply no longer use! So it's probably going crazy over duplicate content right now :(

Member Avatar for T.J

hi all

its true that u have to give google some more time to get them ^_^

and also if you said that ...... It's just that I've been playing around with mod_rewrite so much that it has valid URLs that I simply no longer use

and i think this is it u did some changes so u have to wait and it iwll get them so soon :)

Member Avatar for Antonbomb22

google values ur website which most likely wont give you a duplicate content penatly, it will just disregard one of pages most likely.

Member Avatar for Dani

Well Google has been spidering like crazy yesterday and today. We made it back up to 200,000 pages indexed, and not done crawling yet! Right now 850 people are viewing the site and I am pretty confident at least 300 of them are spiders. (I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing!) Gee, I sure hope Google values us! Heavens knows I value them! ;)

Member Avatar for Dani

Just the next day and 215,000 pages indexed - and a consistant 800+ peeps on the site, with a 15 min session timeout :)

Member Avatar for Dani

Update: We now have half a million pages indexed by Google :) Woot!

Member Avatar for Webvicious

Google is going nuts with their indexing...recaching my sites everyday! Keep adding that new content. :evil:

Member Avatar for Dani

We're up to nearly a million ourselves. I don't know what's up with Google. Do they just love us or what? I sure hope this isn't either a G bug or a dream! Good luck as well, webvicious!

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