Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that Google has “suddenly” deindexed a “large number of URLs” from the Google Search index last February. He said this was done because Google’s “perception of the site has changed”.
Gary said this at the SERP Conf back in mid-April.
Gary said on stage At 10:40am in the interview, “Since February, where we suddenly decided that we’re de-indexing a lot of URLs on one site just because the perception or our perception of the site has changed.”
Here is the embedded video:
Here’s the full transcript:
And generally also the overall quality of the site, which can matter a lot from how many of these have been crawled but not indexed, which you see in Search Console. If the number of these URLs is very high, this could indicate general quality issues. And I’ve seen that a lot since February, where we suddenly decided that we’re de-indexing a lot of URLs on one site just because the perception or our perception of the site has changed.
Oh, so after February, there is a possibility that things have also changed in Google Search Console because your perception, not you personally, but Google’s perception of the site has fundamentally changed.
Therefore, Search Console is correctly using the data that Google indexing and Google ranking or the Google service correctly produces. And then it’s distilling that data into something that’s intelligible to me, to you, or to anyone else because, like raw data, that doesn’t make any sense to us as humans.
And one possibility is that when you see that number increase, Google’s perception of the site has changed. As if that could be a thing. But it could also be that there was an error, for example, on the site and then the exact same page was being served to every URL on the site. This could also be one of the reasons why you see this number increasing. So yes, there could be many things in the vast majority of cases, it’s a technical matter.
Yes, in February we had a series of unconfirmed Google search ranking updates where a bunch of SEOs were complaining about seeing their pages drop out of the Google Search index.
Note that Gary is not saying that you will get the “crawled but not indexed” errors because Google considers your site to be of low quality, it is most likely a technical issue with your site. But if you saw an increase in those “crawled but not indexed” warnings in Search Console in February, it may be related to quality issues on your site.
We covered a bunch of other Gary topics at this event a while back, including:
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