Hi folks,

I'm having trouble figuring out why google won't keep our companies pages indexed. I'm hoping some of you can point me in the direction of a solution or let me know how I could identify someone who has the right skills to troubleshoot the problem for me.

I apologize in advance for the length. I've tried to ask this question in the past and got poor responses because of the missing details.

Quick Background: I run a software product that provides data to service providers for nonprofit organizations (mainly banks, accountants, agencies). After about 18 months of work, we got our database to the point where we could open up a portion of our data to be freely viewable to unauthenticated viewers hoping that we could get these pages to rank on google.

We submitted sitemaps to Google about three months ago, and over that time, we have seen some minor success: Google is crawling our site, and we are now seeing a small increase in organic traffic.

The problem we keep running into is that Google will index a page and then remove that same page from their index after a month or so. This happens to nearly all of the pages that are indexed (>75%).

Page Content: To a large extent, the content on our pages comes from publicly available data sources, and I'm nearly certain that the first comments will be: "Dude, you serving scraped content / autogenerated content / thin content. I'm very familiar with the google definitions of these and what we do does not fit any of these definitions; we have thousands of hours invested in setting up systems aggregate, clean, generate valuable insights from the public data sources that we use as an input to our product.

Also, we see relatively good stats from the organic traffic sent to these pages, indicating that these users are getting value.

- bounce: 65%-70%

- avg time on page: ~2 mins

- pages / session: ~2.3

- free account signup: 4%

To a certain extent, our product is similar to what companies like Dun and Bradstreet or Reuters do for publicly traded companies.

Competitors: This is particularly confusing because we are seeing competitors of ours have success with this strategy. There are two companies out there that do something close to what we do. Both have been able to grow to between 500k - 2 million page views per month (according to Ahrefs) by opening up their database.

While our content does differ slightly from the competition, we are all working from the same publicly available data. If anything, I would argue that our content is stronger as we have less content locked behind a paywall.

Where My Suspisicions Lay: Obviously, I don't know why this is occurring, but I do have a couple of suspicions about why we're seeing this:

1. We are in the sandbox - while our domain isn't new, the pages that Google has indexed are. Most have been on the index for less than three months, and Google is still figuring out where they belong. This doesn't feel right to me, however, because once google drops a page, we haven't seen it get reindexed.
2. Our DR is just too low - Because we are so new (to search engines at least), our DR is very low, <10. This low DR is leading to getting pages dropped from the index. *Again this doesn't feel right to me as >90% of the keywords that we did rank for (and subsequently lost) were extremely low competition. In fact, it's very common for the top-ranked pages have no backlinks whatsoever.*
3. Spammy Backlinks - I have noticed that we're picking up backlinks from domains like health-guide*info, medicineline*info/, domaininfofree*com/, with obviously shit content and no traffic. My understanding is that Google ignores these. Maybe I'm wrong, and I should be disavowing?

If you made it this far, thank you, If you have any thoughts on what might be happening or who I should talk to to find a solution, I'm all ears.