Page disappears from Google search results
-
Hi, I recently encountered a very strange problem.
One of the pages I published in my website ranked very well for a couple of days on top 5, then after a couple of days, the page completely vanished, no matter how direct I search for it, does not appear on the results, I check GSC, everything seems to be normal, but when checking Google analytics, I find it strange that there is no data on the page since it disappeared and it also does not show up on the 'active pages' section no matter how many different computers i keep it open.I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere!
It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Has this ´happened to anyone before?
Any thoughts would be gratefully received.
-
@joelssonmedia said in Page disappears from Google search results:
I've had quite a lot of similar cases like this. The reason it happens is that Google crawls and indexes the pages in many phases. First phase is URL discovery, where it just discovers a new URL via links on your site or sitemap.
Second phase is indexing and first-pass deduplication. If your page has a good quality (in google's eyes) and is not a duplicate to another page on your site, it usually gets indexed. If your page does not pass this phase - it usually appears in "Crawled but not indexed" section.
Third and further phases are connected to further deduplication algorithms, and very few people know exactly what's "under the hood". One of the discoveries that I've had is that if a page does not have sufficient number of incoming links from your site, and Googlebot is not able to discover it from your homepage, it usually won't get indexed. So, my recommendation is:-
check if your page has incoming links from your site and can be discovered from homepage. If not, put a link to your page from your homepage or from one of the first-level pages, and see if it resolves your issue.
-
check if your page is accessible with JavaScript turned off (you can do it in browser settings or with one of the Chrome plugins). In many cases, you may see that the content of the page appears only partially, or may be even completely blank. If yes, speak to you developers to make sure that the page is fully rendered with JS turned off.
-
if nothing works, try to change the top paragraphs of your content and titles/headers and change the URL slightly, while making sure that there are no issues with points (1) and (2). It may happen, that during the crawl, search bot received a server error, in this case you can either wait for the next crawl (I don't know how often Googlebot crawls your website, it usually depends on how high is the Domain Authority of your site), or resubmit the page, as I suggested.
Wishing you luck! These indexing issues are always the trickiest to figure out. If nothing works, feel free to post some more details and we'll try to figure out.
-
-
@joelssonmedia Hi Joe, I will be happy to take a look at it but I would need to see what you're doing, to be honest with you without that I can only guess it could be something like /robots.txt
Robots.txt file URL: www.example.com/robots.txt
User-agent: * Disallow: /
=Blocking all web crawlers from all content
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxtHope this helps,
Tom
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
-
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do. The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again. When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search. Any ideas? [see images where you can see the problem] XTrDn 2doHF
Technical SEO | | robk1230 -
Home Pages of Several Websites are disappearing / reappearing in Google Index
Hi, I periodically use the Google site command to confirm that our client's websites are fully indexed. Over the past few months I have noticed a very strange phenomenon which is happening for a small subset of our client's websites... basically the home page keeps disappearing and reappearing in the Google index every few days. This is isolated to a few of our client's websites and I have also noticed that it is happening for some of our client's competitor's websites (over which we have absolutely no control). In the past I have been led to believe that the absence of the home page in the index could imply a penalty of some sort. This does not seem to be the case since these sites continue to rank the same in various Google searches regardless of whether or not the home page is listed in the index. Below are some examples of sites of our clients where the home page is currently not indexed - although they may be indexed by the time you read this and try it yourself. Note that most of our clients are in Canada. My questions are: 1. has anyone else experienced/noticed this? 2. any thoughts on whether this could imply some sort of penalty? or could it just be a bug in Google? 3. does Google offer a way to report stuff like this? Note that we have been building websites for over 10 years so we have long been aware of issues like www vs. non-www, canonicalization, and meta content="noindex" (been there done that in 2005). I could be wrong but I do not believe that the site would keep disappearing and reappearing if something like this was the issue. Please feel free to scrutinize the home pages to see if I have overlooked something obvious - I AM getting old. site:dietrichlaw.ca - this site has continually ranked in the top 3 for [kitchener personal injury lawyers] for many years. site:burntucker.com - since we took over this site last year it has moved up to page 1 for [ottawa personal injury lawyers] site:bolandhowe.com - #1 for [aurora personal injury lawyers] site:imranlaw.ca - continually ranked in the top 3 for [mississauga immigration lawyers]. site:canadaenergy.ca - ranks #3 for [ontario hydro plans] Thanks in advance! Jim Donovan, President www.wethinksolutions.com
Technical SEO | | wethink0 -
Home Page Deindexed Only at Google after Recovering from Hack Attack
Hello, Facing a Strange issue, wordpress blog hghscience[dot]com was hacked by someone, when checked, I found index.php file was changed & it was showing some page with a hacked message, & also index.html file was added to the cpanel account.All pages were showing same message, when I found it, I replaced index.php to default wordpress index.php file & deleted index.htmlI could not find any other file which was looking suspicious. Site started working fine & it was also indexed but cached version was that hacked page. I used webmaster tool to fetch & render it as google bot & submitted for indexing. After that I noticed home page get deindexed by google. Rest all pages are indexing like before. Site was hacked around 30th July & I fixed it on 1st Aug. Since then home page is not getting indexed, I tried to fetch & index multiple time via google webmasters tool but no luck as of now. 1 More thing I Noticed, When I used info:mysite.com on google, its showing some other hacked site ( www.whatsmyreferer.com/ ) When Searching from India But when same info:mysite.com is searched from US a different hacked site is showing ( sigaretamogilev.by )However when I search "mysite.com" my site home page is appearing on google search but when I check cached URL its showing hacked sites mentioned above.As per my knowledge I checked all SEO Plugins, Codes of homepage, can't find anything which is not letting the homepage indexed.PS: webmaster tool has received no warning etc for penalty or malware. I also noticed I disallowed index.php file via robots.txt earlier but now I even removed that. 7Dj1Q0w.png 3krfp9K.png
Technical SEO | | killthebillion0 -
How is IT handling multi-page search results for this url?
How is the IT team handling multi-page results? The URL is the same - with out any parameters, but the content changes. Is this best way to handle it from an SEO perspective?
Technical SEO | | S.S.N0 -
Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search
Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio
Technical SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Looking for someone to help get reconsidered in Google search.
Hi Guys, I need some extra hands and recently got some notifications from Google about unnatural links and this is something I've known about already. I've tried a few times to email webmasters but there is little to no results. I'm looking for some individuals that are great at getting reconsidered to Google. The site I am working on already is being ranked but this is a partial ban. Please PM me your rates and success with previous campaigns. Ideally, I want a flat rate for 100% guarantee reconsideration. TIA!
Technical SEO | | William.Lau0 -
Authorship and picture in search results
Tim and Kris Hallbom at this site: nlpca(dot)com are authors of several books and many great articles, and they would like their picture to show up in their search results. Articlebase.com contacted us and called it authorship, and said that they could get our picture to begin showing up in appropriate google searches. But we don't want to go through Articlebase.com, how do we do this? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0