Glenn Gabe was the first to notice the huge increase in URLs, which seemed to start on July 26th. One site of his saw a jump of 10 million pages, which is a pretty significant increase, even for huge sites. While he initially wondered if it was a bug, as we had seen another indexing bug recently in Google Search Console, but Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed it is a standard change on Google’s end with their indexing.
This is good news for webmasters with larger sites who weren’t seeing their entire site indexed previously. And while Illyes isn’t revealing the numbers, when we see some websites are gaining 10 million indexed pages, it is a pretty significant change.
The changes will be reflected on your “Index Status” page within the “Google Index” section of Google Search Console. If your site sees changes, it will be shown with the 7/26/15 date on the chart. Since this is appears to be a change to the fundamental way Google decides the pages to index, webmasters should continue to see their indexed page numbers continue to grow.
That said, just because they are indexed doesn’t necessarily mean they will rank. But it means that SEOs can also optimize those pages once they are indexed.
Illyes also confirmed that it is not a failure of Google removing duplicated content.
Lastly, when Gabe was questioning exactly what changes Google made and whether it was related to indexing dynamically generated URLs.
This is a great change for SEOs, especially those with larger sites that may have had issues with getting all the pages within the site indexed previously.
Jennifer Slegg
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