Crawled - Currently Not Indexed Issues + Other GSC "Things"

[mrpotato]

I recently got hit in Dec by the HCU. I noticed that my indexed URLs went from about 1200 to 1050 in GSC. So, 150 URLs from Nov - Feb dropped out of the index.

I also noticed that my not indexed pages went from 3100 to 3400.

1700 of those are Crawled - Currently Not Indexed and I'm not really sure what to do with this. Tons of these in GSC are showing domain.com/post-name/feed/. No idea why these exist or what they are for even.

Considering the hit, I'm contemplating removing all pages that lost indexing in an attempt to tell Google, okay, if you don't like these pages anymore, I'll just remove them and get rankings back for the rest of the domain "hopeful thinking" along with doing other stuff.

I've already removed lots of non-relevant content or content not tight to the main site theme. Curious what your thoughts are on this and what approach you'd take?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Some images of some data to share...

MODERATOR NOTE: EMBED YOUR IMAGES, DON'T LINK TO THEM

Funny thing is, on the experience side in GSC, I'm green all around with GOOD showing for everything there.

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks in advance for your help!

Mr. Potato Out!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Tons of these in GSC are showing domain.com/post-name/feed/. No idea why these exist or what they are for even.

These are RSS feed links created by Wordpress for categories and even for comments. You can look up how to remove them from your source code so that Google doesn't discover and crawl them. But they're saying that they know not to index them, meaning they aren't a problem. I'd prefer for them to not even waste crawling resources on it. It's a very quick and easy fix in your functions.php.

In regards to any kneejerk reactions like deleting content, I'd usually say "don't do it" but it's been long enough that Google isn't going to reverse this nightmare they created for themselves, where Reddit, Quora, and a few behemoth magazine groups get all of the traffic.

In the past, we could assume we did something wrong and set out to fix it, in good faith that Google's algorithm was going to approximate and rank good quality. That's not what they're doing right now. I'm not convinced this has anything to do with quality or helpful content, since everyone got thrashed. I mean damn near everyone. There's no way everyone got it wrong. As many decent sites as bad sites got destroyed, and as many great sites as decent sites got it, too. Like I said elsewhere, not even the guru's and the contrarians are poking their heads out bullshitting anyone. Everyone got hit.

So kneejerk away, and maybe you discover something. I've heard tale of someone deindexing all their content (except the homepage and boilerplate pages) until they felt they popped out of the HCU negative valuation, then brought the content back. They'll get hit again. Play around and experiment if you want. But right now is such a time of chaos there's not much sense being made by anyone yet, likely because we're expecting the motivation behind this to be increasing quality, when it's clearly an attempt at defending against AI content in the same way it's always been, just cranked up to the maximum. "Turn the dial towards the top 50 biggest brands and towards Reddit and even that complete piece of shit Quora so we don't seem biased, we'll work out the rest later." This has been their go-to for fighting against spam and affiliates forever, they just put it into overdrive this time, because AI content production is in overdrive. No need to figure out how to filter it all out if nobody else is allowed to rank at all.

It's always convenient to blame Google for being deranked, or Amazon for breaking their affiliate ToS, etc. But this is one of the rare cases where we can fairly confidently say the problem doesn't lie with us. This time, it truly lies with Google.

 

[infotech]

I have an image heavy site, low on text content. Same thing happening with me.

 

[bernard]

I don't have that many pages and my pages are indexed - but not ranking.

I'm going to unpublish the pages that have been not ranking for 6 months now.

I've had them come back somewhat by resubmitting in GSC and changing some stuff, but it's clear that there's some kind of keyword ban going on.

They won't rank for "widget review" at all, but they'll rank for "widget review 2023" and sometimes "best reviews". It's specifically *review they don't like. I don't think it has to do with that exact word though, I think it's some kind of automatic keyword ban.

Some people no Twitter were talking about changing publishing dates to recover from HCU, I don't believe in that. I do notice that old content, that is similar to content already existing, on the site or elsewhere, seems to have been hit the hardest.

I also deleted some of these posts and they were out of the index very fast. That's not typical.

I'd say it suggests it wouldn't be a bad idea to get rid of those posts that were hit by HCU. For me, I am going to rewrite them and publish again.

 

[mrpotato]

Thanks all for the input. I'll be taking action and running validations as well as deleting content and reporting back in an update.