Q and A: Why is Google indexing fewer pages on our site?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks for all your great advice. My question is this:

We have had www.livingwithanxiety.com for several years now. We just
recently did a major update and finally, after years, we changed our
meta tags, titles, and so on. We have been submitting an xml sitemap
to google now for about three months. We topped out at about 42 pages
being indexed, but today, we looked and have only 9. What happened? Is
it because of the changes? Traffic literally has halved. Hmm...

Thanks again for all you do!

Sincerely,
Nashell

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Nashell

I've checked and Google has currently indexed 25 pages on your site.

If you were ranking for particular keywords before your site update, the changes you made may have negatively impacted that. If you are certain your new page content, META and Title tags have been optimized well for target keywords, it is more likely that you have been caught up in the Google aging delay or Sandbox effect for re-designed sites.

You should continue to update and submit your XML sitemap whenever you add new content, build more incoming links and wait for Google to let you out of rankings limbo. Be patient!

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