Question: I have seen a sudden drop in index status on Google Search Console from 32000 to 17000. What could be the cause and how to fix it? Thanks!

Answer: Here are some possibilities for why Google’s indexation status might decline:

If you see a sudden drop in the number of indexed pages, it might mean that your server is down or overloaded, or that Google is having trouble accessing your content.

You have to do a detailed analysis of your website like checking robots.txt file and source code of the pages. Maybe a particular section of the website is suffering, or a specific type of page is no longer indexing well.

Crawl budget lessened since Googlebot hasn’t detected any new changes, so no longer crawls or indexes as deep or as frequently. Loss or reduction in your back-links which may affect your crawl budget.

Only counts exact URLs in the sitemap. And the ‘indexing Status’ report is done by a background batch job, so sometimes laggy. In short, you can’t really deduce ANYTHING conclusive from these fluctuations (alone). They MAY well just be natural variations.

Google may also remove URLs of those products’ pages that no longer available.

The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicates, non-canonical, or those that contain a meta noindex tag.

Check responsiveness of your website and resubmit sitemap.

You can also hire our professional SEO consultants to do a deep analysis of your website to fix the issues quickly and efficiently.

If you want to add something to this answer, then do let us know in the comments below.