There are some things about your website you simply can’t ignore — manual penalties, negative SEO, stuff like that. There are other problems that can come up, too. They aren’t quite as obvious, but they are just as damaging.
In this article, I share with you four of these data-driven alarm signals. I want to you to know exactly what metrics to watch, how to find out if you’re in danger, and what you should do about it.
1. Loss of Indexed Pages
What It Is
Google’s algorithm crawls your site and puts these pages into their vast index to be returned in search results for relevant queries. As a courtesy to you, they tell you in Google Webmaster Tools exactly how many pages of your site are in their index.
If you are consistently adding new content and maintaining a valid sitemap.xml, this number should rise. Of course, if you intentionally remove certain pages, then the number will go down. However, if the number of indexed pages drops suddenly or declines gradually over time, then you have a problem on your hands.
