Alert: Google is Shrinking
Wow, a rare lunchtime post on SBS…
No, not their stock price – that’s still getting bigger. I’m talking about Google’s index.
There are a couple sites I’ve been monitoring regularly since September to see how many pages are in Google’s index. Have a look at the data:
site:citysearch.com
September 18, 2007: 13,000,000+ pages indexed
October 24, 2007: 11,000,000+ ” ”
November 5, 2007: 835,000 ” ”
November 8, 2007: 759,000 ” ”
(From 13 million down to 759,000? Ouch.)
site:yelp.com
September 18, 2007: 525,000+ pages indexed
November 5, 2007: 303,000 ” ”
November 8, 2007: 307,000 ” ”
Here are some other snapshots of pages indexed on sites I haven’t been monitoring regularly, but did check earlier in the year:
site:smartbargains.com
January 30, 2007: 36,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 10,600 pages indexed
site:overstock.com
January 30, 2007: 2,120,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 166,000 pages indexed
I should probably be watching pages indexed on this blog, but I’m not. I do occasionally check my U2 site, which has historically been between 40,000 and 50,000 pages indexed. Today, it’s at 39,000.
Update
Here are three more sites suffering page drops from earlier in the year:
site:target.com
January 11, 2007: 355,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 106,000 pages indexed
site:amazon.com
January 11, 2007: 11,700,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 8,640,000 pages indexed
site:walmart.com
January 11, 2007: 753,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 85,800 pages indexed
That’s Not All!
On Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry wrote about how Google is showing fewer results for some queries. He links to an interesting discussion on WebmasterWorld where people are sharing sample queries they’ve seen as evidence.
I’d love to have time to dig into this more, but from all that’s being said, it seems pretty clear that Google is getting smaller: fewer pages indexed and fewer results being returned.
The obvious question: Why?
The obvious answer?
To make Judd’s Day Suck.
I actually DO have time devoted to figuring some of this out, and that’s all I can come up with.
If I can find anything else, I’ll letcha know. Ta.
Hopefully it is because Google is improving there duplicate page detection. I love of Dynamic Pages have been programmed in such a way that same content can be displayed in 2 or 3 different places. I’m fixing one clients site that had 5 URLs for each product! There were links for changing currency, printer friendly versions of the page, and a few other buggy things. In the end I’ll be dropping the overall page count from 28,000 to around 3,000. There are currently 4,500 indexed by Google, but not all the important pages.