In this article we explain the unique Index Fluctuations report in Indexing Insight.
What is the Index Fluctuations report?
The index fluctuation report helps identify which pages are being actively jumping between Indexed and Not Indexed in Google Search Console.
How is the Index Fluctuations report calculated?
Indexing Insight detects and captures when page's indexing state fluctuates.
The report shows the pages which have an Number of Indexing Changes greater than 2. And have indexing status of either 'submitted and indexed' and/or 'crawled - previously indexed'.
We then group the pages with indexing state fluctuations into the Index Fluctuations report. And sort the pages by the Number of Indexing Changes.
How can the Index Fluctuations report help me?
The Index Fluctuations report can help you prioritise fixing your indexing issues.
To understand how the index fluctuations report can help you we need to better understand how Google's Search index works.
Google's Search index (we believe) manages which pages are Indexed or Not Indexed by using a Quality (Q*) threshold benchmark score.
Each piece of content in Google's Search index is given a page quality score (Q*).
If a page quality score is above this benchmark then it is Indexed. However, if the page quality score is below the benchmark score then it is marked as Not Indexed.
This Quality benchmark score is not a static. It fluctuates constantly.
This means that your pages which are close to the Quality (Q*) benchmark score jump in and out being Indexed and Not Indexed.
A page's indexing state fluctuates near the Quality (Q*) benchmark threshold.
Pages with scores fluctuating near the quality threshold require only minimal optimisation to exceed the benchmark score.
This report gives you a priority list of pages to work on to achieve long-term indexing.
