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We have revamped our website and removed old dummy pages few month ago (we had around 600 and now 90 pages) Now our SEO guy complaining that site index goes down due to poor development. He says the chart is not going up because site is not get indexing. I said its just a number of pages from website and we can not expect it to go up.

Someone could advise me if I'm wrong? enter image description here

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  • You are correct. If the pages you removed were dummy pages/thin content, Google would have likely removed those eventually too, so the number of indexed pages would have gone down regardless.
    – dan ♦
    Commented Jul 25, 2018 at 4:52
  • The notion that content is King has never been as true as it is now. However, please also consider that changing a site as you describe is also distruptive so do not be surprised if search is disrupted. It will take a while for the site to regain any ground. Sites with a few pages can perform well, however, the opportunity to capture search users increases with increased content. It is a no brainer! Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jul 25, 2018 at 5:22
  • I'd not focus on the old indexing report. Use the new report and sitemaps to check that the pages you want indexed are indexed, if they are, forget about indexing and look into how those pages are performing.
    – Tony McCreath
    Commented Jul 28, 2018 at 1:24

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Google will only index as many pages as you have available. So if you have 100 pages, Google might index something close to that number, but not any more than that. It will seek out the most content worthy pages and leave out as many low quality URLs as it can, such as duplicate content, empty pages.

If for some reason you removed 600 pages that are considered high quality, meaning good content, unique titles and descriptions, unique URL, etc. Then that was a bad idea and you will hurt for it.

But otherwise if you removed 600 low quality pages, then what you did was good but you'd have to wait a bit for Google to figure out what to rank you for again. Traffic will fluctuate and you'd have to advise your SEO guy to be patient, monitor the index, and ensure that few pages you have now are correctly optimized for search.

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  • I would add that the SEO guy should know this already. If not, perhaps their employment should be reviewed. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jul 25, 2018 at 14:26

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