Trying to figure out why one of my popular pages was de-indexed from Google.
-
I wanted to share this with everyone for two reasons. 1. To try to figure out why this happened, and 2 Let everyone be aware of this so you can check some of your pages if needed.
Someone on Facebook asked me a question that I knew I had answered in this post. I couldn't remember what the url was, so I googled some of the terms I knew was in the page, and the page didn't show up. I did some more searches and found out that the entire page was missing from Google.
This page has a good number of shares, comments, Facebook likes, etc (ie: social signals) and there is certainly no black / gray hat techniques being used on my site. This page received a decent amount of organic traffic as well.
I'm not sure when the page was de-indexed, and wouldn't have even known if I had't tried to search for it via google; which makes me concerned that perhaps other pages are being de-indexed. It also concerns me that I have done something wrong (without knowing) and perhaps other pages on my site are going to be penalized as well.
Does anyone have any idea why this page would be de-indexed? It sure seems like all the signals are there to show Google this page is unique and valuable. Interested to hear some of your thoughts on this.
Thanks
-
I did the fetch as google and everything looks normal. I also do not have any erros that have anything to do with this page.
It's very strange. It seems to have happen all of a sudden.
-
Go to do your Webmaster Tools and do a "Fetch as Google" on the page. Also check for any errors while you're there.
Is it possible that you had a noindex tag on the page at least temporarily in the past?
-
Thanks for your message. I've already checked that, and the site was in face de indexed.
-
Hello
I've had a few pages fall off the radar, however these pages weren't de-indexed, they just didn't show up for the keywords they used to. Try site:www.yourdomain.com/page/ to see if the page has actually been de-indexed.
The only conclusion I could come to with regards why my pages that fell off a cliff was the ratio of natural to commercial anchor text. I had more than 50% of anchor texts to those pages from exact keyword anchor texts.
Inner pages need brand and natural anchor text profiles also, not just the home page (so yourdomain.com/page, www.yourdomain.com/page, http://www.yourdomain.com/page).
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Very strange, inconsistent and unpredictable Google ranking
I have been searching through these forums and haven't come across someone that faces the same issue I am. The folks on the Google forums are certain this is an algorithm issue, but I just can't see the logic in that because this appears to be an issue fairly unique to me. I'll take you through what I've gone through. Sorry for it being long. Website URL: https://fenixbazaar.com 1. In early February, I made the switch to https with some small hiccups. Overall however the move was smooth, had redirects all in place, sitemap, indexing was all fine. 2. One night, my organic traffic dropped by almost 100%. All of my top-ranking articles completely disappeared from rank. Top keyword searches were no longer yielding my best performing articles on the front page of results, nor on the last page of results. My pages were still being indexed, but keyword searches weren't delivering my pages in results. I went from 70-100 active users to 0. 3. The next morning, everything was fine. Traffic back up. Top keywords yielding results for my site on the front page. All was back to normal. Traffic shot up. Only problem was the same issue happened that night, and again for the next three nights. Up and down. 4. I had a developer and SEO guy look into my backend to make sure everything was okay. He said there were some redirection issues but nothing that would cause such a significant drop. No errors in Search Console. No warnings. 5. Eventually, the issue stopped and my traffic improved back to where it was. Then everything went great: the site was accepted into Google News, I installed AMP pages perfectly and my traffic boomed for almost 2 weeks. 6. At this point numerous issues with my host provider, price increases, and incredibly outdated cpanel forced me to change hosts. I did without any issues, although I lost a number of articles albeit low-traffic ones in the move. These now deliver 404s and are no longer indexed in the sitemap. 7. After the move there were a number of AMP errors, which I resolved and now I sit at 0 errors. Perfect...or so it seems. 8. Last week I applied for hsts preload and am awaiting submission. My site was in working order and appeared set to get submitted. I applied after I changed hosts. 9. The past 5 days or so has seen good traffic, fantastic traffic to my AMP pages, great Google News tracking, linking from high-authority sites. Good performance all round. 10. I wake up this morning to find 0 active people on my site. I do a Google search and notice my site isn't even the first result whenever I do an actual search for my name. The site doesn't even rank for its own name! My site is still indexed but search results do not yield results for my actual sites. Check Search Console and realised the sitemap had been "processed" yesterday with most pages indexed, which is weird because it was submitted and processed about a week earlier. I resubmitted the sitemap and it appears to have been processed and approved immediately. No changes to search results. 11. All top-ranking content that previously placed in carousal or "Top Stories" in Google News have gone. Top-ranking keywords no longer bring back results with my site: I went through the top 10 ranking keywords for my site, my pages don't appear anywhere in the results, going as far back as page 20 (last page). The pages are still indexed when I check, but simply don't appear in search results. It's happening all over again! Is this an issue any of you have heard of before? Where a site is still being indexed, but has been completely removed from search results, only to return within a few hours? Up and down? I suspect it may be a technical issue, first with the move to https, and now with changing hosts. The fact the sitemap says processed yesterday, suggests maybe it updated and removed the 404s (there were maybe 10), and now Google is attempting to reindexed? Could this be viable? The reason I am skeptical of it being an algorithm issue is because within a matter of hours my articles are ranking again for certain keywords. And this issue has only happened after a change to the site has been applied. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | fenixbazaar0 -
Schema Mark up - Product Listing Pages
Hi I know you can add product schema to a product page, but can you add mark up to a product listing/category page? If so, which one would you use? I saw the item list mark up but didn't think this was relevant. Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Has Google Authorship been completely removed from SERPs?
Noticed today that when I search (non-personalised search, incognito etc.) some of my pages on Google ALL references to authorship have now been completely removed. Does anyone know when this change occurred? I might be a bit slow this week (or last week) with concentrating on projects. I know like others that photos went some time back but now there are no author details being displayed. Just the page title and description. David
Algorithm Updates | | David-E-Carey1 -
How to get indexed in yahoo and bing?
Hello all I have uploaded sitemap to bing webmaster on January 21st, 2014. However, the site has not been indexed yet. I see few pages crawled and some crawl page error but it does not show what pages have an error. Can anyone help me please on how to get this done right so i can can our website indexed in Bing and Yahoo quickly. By the way our website address is : http://www.eduniche.com
Algorithm Updates | | Eva20140 -
Pages fluctuating +/- 70 positions in Google SERPs?
I've got some pages that appear somewhere around #25 in Google. Every now and then, it just goes away from the top 100 results for a few days (even up to a week) and then it comes back. I've got other pages that rank around #8 which falls down to about #75 for a while and then it comes back. But while a page may be gone from the top 100 results in the US, it still ranks at about the same place everywhere else in the world (+/- 10 positions). I've seen this happen in the past but never it happened so often. What gives?!?
Algorithm Updates | | sbrault740 -
Is it OK to 301 redirect the index page to a search engine friendly url
Is it OK to 301 redirect the index page to a search engine friendly url.
Algorithm Updates | | WinningInch0 -
Has there been a Google change in the last 24 hours?
We have come in this morning to find our site (paydayuk.co.uk) has suddenly disappeared from their SERPs, we have consistently been ranking in the top 5 for a wide range of search terms but now do not even appear for our brand name of Payday UK where we have been first for many months. Our site is still indexed and we have made no changes for a while as any SEO work is waiting on completion of a CMS system. Looking in https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking and there seem to be a lot of people having the same issues but as of yet no answers. I'd also like to add we don’t use black hat techniques so we really don’t understand why we have been penalised. Can anyone help please?
Algorithm Updates | | Sarbs0 -
Test contet/pages indexed by search engines
During the web development stages of our Joomla CMS website, we have managed to get our site indexed for totally irrelevant test pages mainly to do with Joomla and some other equally irrelevant test content. How damaging is this to our domain from an SEO prospective and is there something we can do about it? When we do a site:domain.com search we see hundreds of testpages with test/irrelevant meta tags etc.
Algorithm Updates | | Fuad_YK0