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I am observing a pattern on my website where pages with zero to very less traffic for about 6 months are being de-indexed. I am not sure if this is just a coincidence.

Stephen Ostermiller
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Kannan
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2 Answers2

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Google doesn't look directly at traffic, but they do calculate your page's importance to determine whether it should be indexed. If Google determines that your page is of very low importance on the internet, they will de-index the page. To fix this, increase your page's authority.

Maximillian Laumeister
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    I'm not so sure they don't look at traffic. They now mark pages as "low interest" in my search console. I think they take into account how many people are likely to see it in the search results as part of their indexing decisions. Although I do agree that "importance" in terms of reputation (PageRank) also factors heavily into their decision whether or not to index a page. – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 03 '18 at 14:20
  • @StephenOstermiller They do look at traffic from Google Search afaik, but of course they don't look at overall site traffic (as they don't have that data). I get what you're saying about prospective Google search traffic. – Maximillian Laumeister Dec 03 '18 at 16:50
  • @StephenOstermiller Are you still seeing "low interest" reports. I thought it was removed as they thought it would cause confusion. From what I recall those pages are indexed, but they don't show up much in search. So more of a flag to the webmaster and maybe crawl frequency. – Tony McCreath Dec 09 '18 at 01:09
  • It has been a little while since I saw that in search console. – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 09 '18 at 01:38
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Web pages with less or no activity are not de-indexed by googlebot. What you are actually experiencing is google search engine cache time for those web pages that are set to expire, no follow, no cache, ect. Google follows these rule for the entire website and individual pages. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1687222?hl=en

morgansbyers
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    Google doesn't index every page that it is allowed to index. On some large sites, 50% of crawlable, indexable pages may not actually get indexed. – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 03 '18 at 14:21