A webmaster or SEO said on a site he works with, about "18,000 urls were suddenly deindexed" by Google "in a few days." And John Mueller from Google said on Twitter "things always come & go over time, so just hearing about 18k URLs dropping out doesn't seem that surprising to me."
I mean, if a site I ran had 18,000 URLs drop out of Google's index in a short period of time like that, I think I would be concerned and surprised. Wouldn't you?
Let me share the context of the tweets, there are currently a total of four:
I'm not aware of anything specific. Do you have details in a forum thread somewhere?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) November 5, 2020
We never index all content, and things always come & go over time, so just hearing about 18k URLs dropping out doesn't seem that surprising to me. Sometimes a change in indexing has no effect on traffic at all, for example.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) November 5, 2020
I mean, sure, pages drop out of the index. If you have several billions pages indexed and 18,000 drop out, sure - no big deal. But for the average site seeing 18,000 pages just vanish from Google, I would be surprised and concerned.
Oh, the GIF above is to symbolize pages dropping like flies.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
