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So I have a site I would prefer not to mention but when I search for my sitename on Google I get too many pages to count of hits. But if I look on the search console it tell me this enter image description here

Does this mean I have only 11 pages viewable through organic search.... And how could something like this happen. Is this normal?

This is not a duplicate question because my site is quite old. It has many many search results on site:<website_name> but apparently I only have 11(!) indexed pages but on google I find many more which contradicts the information provided by the webmaster.

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  • Does this answer help? webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/72610/…
    – closetnoc
    May 3, 2018 at 3:28
  • It helps but it's not the answer I wanted. See the revisions above. May 3, 2018 at 16:43
  • You will find that Google Search Console can be behind reality by quite a bit. I hope that is the case here. Otherwise, I am not sure.
    – closetnoc
    May 3, 2018 at 16:47
  • It looks like you moved your site but didn't add the new property to Google Search Console. Did you migrate to HTTPS in December? May 3, 2018 at 17:49
  • Yes we did! So do I have to, on the google search console, provide a new sitemap with only the https versions? Thank you by the way. :D May 4, 2018 at 2:50

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So it turns out on google search console for my site there exists an http version and an https version. This is what I think happened. We switched to https and suddenly we got a spike in indexed pages. It did really well for a month or two but because the sitemap wasn't updated the bot thought that we had hundreds of internal 404s which is not great for the SEO and so we fell. Here is the https index numberenter image description here

The lesson being make sure when you switch to https that your .htaccess directs to the right replacement pages. Thanks to Stephen Ostermiller! :D

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