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Large marketplace site suddenly dropped from Google around May 6 – sitemap only showing 33 URLs
Posted by on May 8, 2026 at 11:26 amHi everyone,
We run a marketplace site with a large number of listing and content pages.
Since around May 6, 2026, we seem to have almost disappeared from Google search results. We are trying to understand what could have happened.
Some context:
– Google Search Console previously showed around 103k indexed pages.
– Around May 6, visibility appears to have dropped heavily.
– Our sitemap currently only seems to show around 33 URLs.
– In GSC, we also see many pages under:
– Discovered – currently not indexed
– Crawled – currently not indexed
– Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
– Soft 404
– Alternative page with proper canonical tag
What feels strange is that the site still has many live pages, and GSC still shows a large historical indexed count, but Google now seems to be seeing a very limited sitemap.
We are not sure if the sitemap issue alone could cause this kind of sudden drop, or if it points to something bigger like canonicals, soft 404s, noindex, rendering, or Google simply re-evaluating the site.
Has anyone seen something similar recently?
If a large site’s sitemap suddenly only exposes a small number of URLs, how quickly could that impact indexing/visibility in Google?
What would you check first in this situation?
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1 Reply
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[removed]
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“Our sitemap currently only seems to show around 33 URLs.”
But why? u can control your own sitemap and have as many URLs as u want.
Or u mean something else by this.And also did u check manual action report in search console?
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How many pages do you have indexed?
Images would be really helpful, can’t remember if the forum allows.
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Thats a BIG hit!
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A sitemap dropping from 100k URLs to 33 usually means something broke sitewide, not just a normal indexing fluctuation. The soft 404 and canonical issues are bigger red flags here. I’d first check for recent changes to canonicals, noindex tags, robots.txt, templates, or sitemap generation around May 5–6. Then test a few affected URLs in live inspection to see how Google is rendering them. I’ve seen big marketplace sites drop fast after faceted nav or internal linking changes too. Did anything major change on the technical side recently?
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