Google's John Mueller in a video hangout last Friday at the 1:04 mark into the video addressed the common question of why does a page or URL show up in Google's index for a couple days or so and then drop out, especially new URLs that were not indexed yet by Google.
John Mueller explains that there are essentially two ways to get indexed, one is the normal indexing method where when pages get indexed they are more likely to stay in the index for longer periods of time. The second he called "fast track" indexing where Google quickly puts it into the index, maybe because you used the submit to index feature in the fetch as Google in Google Search Console. Those pages may not stay in the index for long periods of time, not at least until the normal indexing method picks up the page.
- Fast track indexing can lead to pages getting indexed faster but may not result in the page staying in the index.
- Normal indexing will likely result in the page being found in the Google index for longer periods of time.
This is a common behavior seen for years and years, where new sites and pages would be indexed quickly and then drop out and come back into the index at a later date.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Here is the transcript:
Question:
We have some pages that we use the fetch as Google tool, to just make sure they were okay, to make sure they were indexed because some were not in the index yet. They are in our sitemap. And out of, last week, we did about 17 of them, 9 of them have been indexed and stayed in the index and about 8 of them are in the index or were in the index and about a week later, they have fallen out of the index. Is that normal? Can that happen? Is there an explanation for that?
Answer:
That can definitely happen.So the submit to index tool is essentially a way to fast track the speed for indexing but it doesn’t mean that they will remain like that. So what can happen on the one hand is that they switch into like the primary indexing mode where we index it normally, that can happen kind of immediately afterwards or overlapping where you wouldn’t see anything drop. Sometimes what happens is the more normal indexing in the later steps where a URL will be indexed first with kind of fast track indexing and drop out for a couple days and then be indexed normally.
So that is something that can definitely happen.
It usually is not a sign that there is anything wrong with those pages. It really is that we haven’t gotten to them with the normal indexing and therefor maybe it will take a little bit longer to kind of move over to that second part.
Forum discussion at YouTube Live.
