Don’t Use Number of Indexed Pages as a Primary Success Metric
*The guest post is by Hugo Guzman who is the Vice President of SEO & Social Media at Zeta Interactive. He can be reached via email at hguzman@zetainteractive.com or via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/hugoguzman*
I was speaking with a prospective client today that shared what they thought was their most pressing SEO issue for one of the larger sites in their network. Basically, they explained that in the process of performing a migration from an old domain to a newer one (for branding purposes) their number of indexed pages in Google dropped from around 80,000 to around 30,000 thousand, and that this drop was the primary reason for their drop in organic search engine referrals to the site.
After poking around the site in question as well as the corresponding Google Analytics profile, a key variable immediately manifested itself:
According to Google Analytics, only 20,000 or so of their pages were responsible for all of their site referrals, even back when 80,000 or so were indexed.
That basically means that there’s no way that the drop in indexed pages was directly responsible for their drop in organic search referrals, because 60,000 or so of the pages that were originally indexed never generated a single visit. They were likely pages that were in Google’s index but ranked very poorly for specific search terms.
I quickly explained to these folks that instead of using the total number of indexed pages as a primary metric, they needed to use their analytics data to understand which of the original 80,000 pages was responsible for the natural search referrals, and furthermore, what keywords were responsible for that referred traffic. It’s too early to confirm, but I’m betting that when they dig a little deeper, they’ll quickly realize that a relatively small number of pages (probably a few thousand) are responsible for 90% or more of all historical organic search referrals, and that identifying those pages and insuring that they are indexed and ranking well will be the key to resolving their current issue.
Clearly, chasing after soft and misleading metrics like number of indexed pages can lead to wild goose chases that point marketers in the wrong direction. It’s certainly a metric worth tracking and understanding, but 9 times out of 10, you need to take a deeper dive into hard analytics data to uncover the really valuable insights that can drive SEO success.
Ann Smarty
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6 Responses to “Don’t Use Number of Indexed Pages as a Primary Success Metric”
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This is a great piece of research you did on GA Ann! I had the number of indexed pages as a rather important factor myself. I will definitely try and do some digging into this. Very interesting post!
Thanks for comment and feedback, Etienne. I’m glad you found this post useful. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions or want to talk more about this.
Unfortunately people jump to conclusions like this all the time.
“We know indexed pages is an important metric for SEO visibility, and we know our traffic dropped along with our indexed pages dropping.”
That’s correlation – not causation.
By that logic you could flip that assumption and say that the traffic dropping during the period when Google was reindexing pages at the new domain caused Google index fewer pages (because Google noticed a drop in user engagement).
That might sound silly, but logically speaking it’s just as legitimate as the first assumption.
Both are jumps to unproven conclusions – and that kind of thing gets dangerous when people feel pressured to “fix it.” Glad to hear you steered them back to their analytics where they’ll find more verifiable data.
Thanks for the feedback, Mike.
As you and I both know, there are a lot of unfounded conclusions that lead marketers astray. That’s why it’s important to not only lean on analytics as opposed other “soft” metrics, but to also understand how to interpret and leverage the analytics data itself in order to take action that nets measurable results.
Thank-you for your insight on the subject as well as your response to my google post. For our site being newly released Michigan Mortgage Company there are no analytics to compare with previous months. Also It is important for Google to index multiple pages that we specialize in so they can be found by our clients in different locations. Thanks again!
Great insights here, thanks.
It does pay to focus on what’s working (site referrals that do bring traffic) almost like the 80/20 rule for SEO.
I hope/assume you’re still going to get the rest of those pages re-indexed though, right? Seems to make sense to not let all that extra content go to waste, when re-pinging them or improving on-site-interlinking (Amazon-style) would get them all re-indexed in a matter of time.
Thanks,
Dan