Playbook
    seo
    advanced

    Investigate a sudden indexation drop

    You lost 20%+ of indexed pages in Google Search Console. Here is the diagnostic order to find why.

    45 minutesLast reviewed 2026-06-09

    What is happening

    The "Pages" report in Google Search Console shows a sudden drop in "Indexed". Either Google removed pages from the index, or it stopped trusting your sitemap. Either way, organic traffic follows the indexation curve down within 2–4 weeks.

    Diagnose in order

  1. Confirm it is a real drop, not a reporting lag. GSC data lags 2–3 days. If the drop is exactly on a single day with no other signals, wait 48h.
  2. Check the "Why pages aren't indexed" breakdown. GSC tells you the top reasons (Crawled — currently not indexed, Soft 404, Blocked by robots.txt, etc). Each reason has its own fix.
  3. Spot-check 5 dropped URLs. Open them. Are they 404? Redirecting? Returning a noindex? Loading the wrong content?
  4. Check site search. Run site:yourdomain.com in Google. If the count is way down, the drop is real.

    5. Top causes (in order of frequency)

  5. A noindex tag was added by mistake. Look for a recent CMS / theme update that toggled "discourage search engines" or set a global noindex.
  6. `robots.txt` disallow was widened. A new Disallow: / or Disallow: /products/ line nukes huge sections.
  7. Server returns 5xx to Googlebot. Check Lemwatch logs filtered to user-agent Googlebot. If you see 503s, your firewall is rate-limiting Google.
  8. Sitemap shrunk. If your sitemap dropped from 1000 to 100 URLs, Google deindexes the missing 900 over weeks.
  9. Hreflang / canonical errors at scale. A bulk content migration that pointed canonicals to the wrong URL.

    10. Fast fixes

  10. Restore the missing pages if they were deleted by mistake (or 301 them to relevant pages).
  11. Resubmit the sitemap in GSC.
  12. Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing on 5–10 top pages. Bulk requests for thousands are not allowed.

    13. What this doesn't do

    This focuses on indexation. If your traffic dropped but indexation is fine, it is a ranking or algorithm-update issue — see Google algorithm update tracker.

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