Index Fluctuations Report

In this article we explain the unique Index Fluctuations report in Indexing Insight.

The index fluctuation report helps identify which pages are being actively jumping between Indexed and Not Indexed in Google Search Console.

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.

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.

This article is broken down into the following parts:

The report can be found in the INDEXING section within the main navigation.

The segment filter utilises web properties to filter your indexing data based on the folder structure.

To use the segment filter, simply click on the component, and you will see a list of web properties with the number of URLs grouped within each web property. The web properties are sorted from largest to smallest.

Select a web property on which you want to segment your indexing data.

When you select a web property, the data in the app will filter to contain URLs within that web property.

This means that the chart, data table and all reports in the app will only contain the URLs within the web property you selected. So, you can focus on analysing and spotting trends in the key areas of the website.

The 90-day chart shows you the total number of indexed and not indexed pages.

You can use the chart to identify trends for your important pages and different site sections on your website.

The data table filter can be used to filter the indexing data in the data table.

The data table filter allows you to filter on:

When you apply a filter, it updates the data table in the report. You can apply multiple filters to be as specific as you want.

The data table contains all the pages which meet the following criteria:

The data table contains the following data:

The data table is sorted by default to show the pages with the most number of indexing changes.