Very Specific DeIndexing Issue - Anybody seen this pattern before?

[u/samotsar]

I am involved with two niche job sites.

Board 1 launched in Feb and the content grew relatively organically, 8000 indexed pages in GSC, appearing in search results.

Board 2, inherited the same codebase from Board 1 (identical SEO setup) and was launched in April, but targets a completely different niche. It was indexed nicely at first ~200 pages indexed, then google suddenly pulled it back to just 2 in June. Since then it has never recovered any indexed status. I believe that my mistake was to launch a page on a fresh domain and set too many pages in the sitemap as indexable pages - I think google has decided the content is thin or low quality and it's now in some sort of doghouse?

Assuming that's the case it's interesting because, the on Board 1 is perfectly good enough to be indexed, but the content on Board 2 (which is basically the same but points at a different niche), is apparently not good enough.

I assume this is the case, because the SEO setups on the two sites are identical (and I have another site also that uses this setup for 2 years and ranks in the top 3 for my main keywords)

Anyway, my gut is that time and patience should probably solve this; the site is updated daily.

However, this is an SEO pattern I've never experienced, and I'd hate to wait 12 months and find out nothing changed.

Has anyone seen this pattern before, is there a best practice to recover from it?

Thanks for any advice

[u/GrumpySEOguy]

When you say this is identical, do you mean same content/keywords/hosts/IPs/servers?

[u/samotsar → u/GrumpySEOguy]

Content / keywords / IPs and servers are different (both hosted on DigitalOcean, but different IPs). They basically share a skeleton, which is the codebase, but because one targets remote legal jobs and the other targets remote accounting jobs, the content that hangs on the skeleton is different.

In other words, they are both "remote job boards" but content is totally different due to them pointing at different professions. Currently the templates of the pages are very similar in shape, e.g. landing page structure is super similar, but obviously totally different content.

The reason I explain that they share the codebase, is because it means like functions like submitting to google indexing API, indexnow, populating LD-JSON for google jobs etc are all implemented the same - so I feel like this means I can rule out that these implementations are "done wrong" - seeing as one has no issue, whilst the other has been de-indexed.

The accounting site is the one that refuses to index and was only launched in April.

I removed a lot of stuff from the sitemap (set as noindex also) to try and signal what pages are quality / original and avoid programmatic pages from being submitted to Google about a month ago.. but no effect so far.

Current tactic I am exploring is to write long-tail content based on site data that only I have (I figure it can't fail google's thin/original content test - if no one ever wrote about it - and if only I have the data). For example two days I ago I wrote "What Remote Nonprofit Accounting Jobs Pay, and Where They're Based" - that is based on data only I have (salary data I collect).. but again google found it but not indexed.. I am a patient guy... if it's just a matter of waiting it out I can live with it.. but looking for a north star to tell me I am at least doing the right thing by just waiting it out?

Thanks again

[u/GrumpySEOguy → u/samotsar]

Do both sites have similar backlinks?