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Google Dropping Sites from Index |
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 Recently Matt Cutts released some information detailing why webmasters were seeing many of their web pages dropping from Google’s index.
Matt’s article plainly states that pages dropping from the index occur due to changes in crawling and indexing priorities, not due to lack of physical hard drive space as some webmasters have speculated in the past.
Click here to see the article from Matt Cuts
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Background
Since December 2005, Google has been slowly rolling out Bigdaddy, a software upgrade of Google’s crawling and indexing technology. By March 2006, Bigdaddy was fully deployed and has been powering Google’s web site crawling ever since.
After Bigdaddy’s deployment, many webmasters noticed pages dropping from Google’s index. Some incorrectly speculated that Google had run out of hard drive space to fully index every site. Others believed Google had altered their algorithm to heavily filter out untrusted links.
Changes in Link Trust
With Bigdaddy, Google has placed a heavier emphasis on trust factors alongside their crawling algorithm. Sites that link to off-topic pages are now experiencing less crawling and ultimately less indexing. Trust and quality of links is now of the utmost importance.
Google is taking a hard line approach to filtering out untrusted pages. They have decided to not index these pages, instead of dropping the ranking of these pages. This means quality in bound links are even more important than before. In bound links have always been essential to ranking well in Google, but now these links will determine if a site is indexed at all.
Concrete Examples
Matt discussed several examples in his article and each example explains a different part of the new changes.
Observations from the examples:
- Quality of Out Bound Links Matter
- Off-Topic Reciprocal Links are Easily Detectable
- Duplicate Content Equals No Indexing
- Crawling and Indexing Depend on Page Priority
- Use PageRank Well (Tree Structure with Set Fanout)
- Supplemental Results are Refreshed Less Often
- Obvious Link Exchanges Result in Less Crawling
- Untrusted Links are Given Less Weight
- Quality Links Equals More Indexed Pages
- Google is Continuing to Progress in Judging Link Quality
- Reciprocal Links are NOT Automatically Bad
- Bad Reciprocal Links are Bad
Conclusion
Stop approaching SEO as a massive link building effort. Instead start working on quality in content, out bound linking, and in bound linking. |
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