The dangers of site structure rearrangements and not taking notes

[LPH]

Sometimes webmasters focus on the silly things and forget obvious site structure problems. I've been combining hundreds of dead (dying) domains into a network. This adventure began Dec. 2011 with the migration of vB to XF and slowly linking in domains using WordPress multisite. (sidebar - lots of work to do still but finally came up with the "tagline" !)

A major challenge was getting /community to not be duplicated for each domain. So www.domain1.com/community and www.domain3.com/community were showing in the search engines. Ugh.

By May 2012, the new Panda update wiped out results and sites dove from #1 to bye bye G-love. This was actually okay because the sites were not being updated, aka: they sucked.

Anyway - I've mostly ignored G, Bing, Y, and others because the sites were dead and it was time to focus on building things. After all - there is nothing like killing something "average" by advertising ...

Today - I was feeling particularly curious and looked at G webmaster tools and laughed.

The change from www.domain.com/community to community.domain.com is clear as .... but I didn't mark the change made in Dec 2012. Drats.

My take away - keep notes.

 

[DBA]

So you switched to a subdomain and it crashed?

 

[LPH]

So you switched to a subdomain and it crashed?

Yes ... If I go to google.com and put in community.domain.com then it returns 75K. But I didn't have that subdomain in the webmaster tools. Just added it.

 

[RobParker]

The graph is just how many pages are indexed, right?

 

[LPH]

The graph is just how many pages are indexed, right?

Yep. That is my interpretation: Index Status

 

[RobParker]

Yep. That is my interpretation: Index Status

I've always interpreted it as how many new pages the googlebot has had to index on your site. If that's corrects, low isn't necessarily bad. It just means google has your site fully indexed doesn't it?

 

[RobParker]

Oh and we have a jump on the exact same date as you do. I suspect that's nothing to do with your site but a change in the bot behaviour/algorithm.

 

[RobParker]

I've always interpreted it as how many new pages the googlebot has had to index on your site. If that's corrects, low isn't necessarily bad. It just means google has your site fully indexed doesn't it?

Just correcting the slightly as its not quite what I thought.

Total indexed: The total number of URLs currently in Google's index. These URLs are available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google may discover by other means. This number will change over time, as new pages are added and indexed, and old pages are removed. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because it does not include URLs that have been identified as duplicates or non-canonical, or less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag.

The fact that its decreasing could just mean old pages have been removed and its not necessarily a problem.

 

[LPH]

@RobParker

Thank you for sharing. I'll have to dissect this tonight when I'm awake ... been a long day!