Increase or decrease google indexed pages, affect to SEO and traffic?

[rainmaker11]

When I check indexed pages for my site on Google, sometimes it gets around 3400 pages indexed by google but sometimes is 4200 indexed pages. I don't know this can affect to SEO and
traffic when indexed pages are increasing or decreasing on Google? Your inputs are welcomed

 

[wrigmark]

Hi, rainmaker11

As you've stated your website has around 4500 pages and you've not mentioned; do you want all of your pages need to pick on top online or there are some of targeted pages. If you've certain targeted pages to work then it will be easy to trace & find out the exact issue of indexing problem in google search console unless you should make a list of pages and track daily in GS, about its URL structure, html coding part, robot txt., redirects, and other crawling issues. And yes, webpage indexing problem can effect to SEO Strategy by means you can see increase & decrease in visitors to your website through analytics.

Hope it will help you.

Thanks,
Wrig Mark

 

[PTTed]

Does your website have duplicate content issues? Or are there situations where some pages have almost no content on them worth indexing?

If pages don't appear in Google's index, then those pages are not going to bring in any visitors from Google. Also, if those pages aren't indexed, then they aren't passing any PageRank to the other pages on your website when they could be. And if they were, then they would be helping those other pages rank higher.

Really it comes down to what kind of content you have on those pages that aren't being indexed and whether or not that content is of any value to people who would be searching using search engines. If it would be valuable to searchers, then you should make sure you get enough PageRank flowing to those deep pages on your site. In other words, get some decent links that flow PageRank pointing deep into your site to those pages.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

That is not actually true. You can tag a page with noindex, follow and Google will still count the links, so I would imagine anything dropped from the index, as long as it is not penalized, is still going to have its links count.

 

[PTTed]

PTTed

Obviously the noindex, follow does not apply to the OP's question. Yes you can have a page with PageRank removed from the search results by using noindex, follow. And yes that PageRank will still flow through whatever links are on that page.

Is it possible that Google still counts links on pages that Google chose to remove from the index for whatever reason? Yes. My intuition tells me that counting those links would probably decrease the quality of the search results if they allowed them to count. I assume they would not count them for that reason. Maybe it doesn't even matter.