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One of the more common emails we get is from people who think their website has disappeared from Google. If you’re in a similar situation, we have some ideas for you in this article.
If your previously high-ranking website seems to have fallen out of Google altogether, you are probably teetering somewhere between panic and desperation. As friendly consultants who care about your mental health, we want you to know this first:
Don’t panic! You probably didn’t get banned.
Give this a few hours and see if it works itself out.
We say that because it’s the most common scenario that we’ve seen. But if you can’t bear to wait around to see if the problem will resolve itself, read on.
The first thing you need to do is clarify the problem. Specifically, has your entire site been removed from Google, or has it just been knocked down in the rankings? To figure this out, you can do a site search, by typing this into Google:
site: www.myurl.com
(replacing “myurl” with your own URL, of course). If Google doesn’t display any pages from your site, it’s likely that your entire site has been dropped. Another way to check is to take a unique string of text from your website, one that is unlikely to be on anyone else’s site, put it in quotes, and search for it on Google. If Google displays the page from your site that contains this text, then your site hasn’t been dropped from Google.
If your site is still in Google, but your ranks have taken a sudden and dramatic nosedive, skip down to the “What Happened to my Ranks?” section, below. If, after several strategic searches, you still can’t find your site on Google, then yes indeed, your site has been removed from the index, and it’s time to figure out why.
Unintentional Spamming?
It’s possible that your site was found guilty of spamming in Google’s eyes, and got banned. Websites can be banned for SEO spam techniques such as “white on white” text, blatant keyword stuffing, or tricky redirects. J.C. Penney’s website was famously banned temporarily for using a link-buying SEO technique. It’s not likely that your website would be banned if you’ve never done anything to intentionally trick Google into thinking that your site deserves a higher rank than is appropriate.
If you’re not sure about your status as spammer, SEO expert Jill Whalen has a forum that discusses “SEO No-nos.” Read it to get some indication of whether your site was spamming inadvertently.
You’ll also want to check all your messages in Google Webmaster Tools. There, Google will sometimes (but not always) alert website owners that their site has been penalized for spam.
Victim of Foul Play?
Whether you’re into conspiracy theories or not, you should entertain the idea that someone else did the spamming for you, causing your site’s disappearance from Google. We’ve seen it more than once: a site’s domain expires for a short time, and during that period, the pages are taken over by a domain squatter that displays not-so-nice content. Or, your site may have been hacked and stuffed with nuggets of spammy badness (this is especially common with outdated WordPress versions, so keep your WordPress up-to-date, yo!).
The fallout from one of these scenarios is something we describe in our case study of Providence Restaurant. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that even though that site temporarily displayed spam content, it suffered with terrible ranks, but wasn’t entirely dropped from Google’s index.)
Again, Google Webmaster Tools can help you diagnose this problem. Check your messages to see if there have been any alerts describing malware or other problems on your site.
Another form of devious doings on the web is content scraping, which is when other websites steal content from your site and then republish it, often multiple times. If this has happened to you, it is possible that Google banned your site along with the “bad guys” who copied you. Try doing some searches on other search engines, looking for strings of text from your website. You just might find an unexpected match.
Redirects or Canonical Tags Gone Wrong?
We once had a client who inadvertently added a canonical tag on every page of his site pointing to a different domain. Google followed this instruction diligently and removed every page of his site from its index. Yeowch! The good news: once the errant canonical tag was removed, ranks and indexing were back where they belonged within a couple of weeks.
We have also seen examples of sites that redirect their pages to another domain using a 301 redirect, and then are surprised when their domain is dropped from Google. A 301 redirect is like a permanent change-of-address for search engines. If you redirect your entire domain to somewhere else, Google is not going to continue to display your domain in its search results.
Robots.txt or Robots Meta Tag Deindexing?
Have you double-checked that you didn’t accidentally deindex your entire site with the robots.txt file or robots meta tags?
Here’s the line you really don’t want to have in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
And here is a tag that really shouldn’t be on every page of your site:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
Go on… check it now. We won’t judge you.
Server Outage?
Your server might have hiccupped just when Googlebot came to visit your site recently, but that shouldn’t cause your site to be dropped from the index. We believe that Google will check a site at least a couple of times before dropping it. But, if the site went down for an extended period (days, weeks), this could be an explanation.
Most likely, the bot will come back and rediscover your site, and you’ll find your site back where it belongs after that. But how long will you have to wait? It depends on how many links there are to your site and how often Googlebot visits it. While there’s no sure-fire way to trigger a visit from Googlebot, getting some new inbound links, refreshing your content a bit, and submitting to the free URL submittal page probably won’t hurt. You can submit an XML Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools, which has the nice fringe benefit of telling you how many of your URLs are indexed.
In the future, if your site has anticipated downtime, set a 503 server status so that search engines will know it’s just a temporary glitch.
Reinclusion Request
If you are certain your site has been penalized for spam or malware, you can submit to Google’s request for reinclusion page. Matt Cutts of Google has posted some information on how to file a reinclusion request. But before you file a request, be very, very sure that there’s nothing spammy on your site.
What Happened To My Ranks?
If Google hasn’t actually removed your site, but you just noticed a sudden and substantial drop in rank for your favorite keywords, there are several possible explanations:
- Google could have made an intentional change to its results or its algorithm. Panda and Mayday are a couple examples of famous algorithm shifts that blew some sites out of the water. SearchEngineLand.com is a good place to look into industry chatter about algorithm updates. See also our post about recovering from Panda.
- Google could be experiencing some temporary weirdness that makes the results different from what you’re used to. As we mentioned at the top of this article, we’ve seen this so many times with so many clients that this is probably the most likely scenario. In this case, just check your ranks again in a day or so . You might once again see that good rank you were used to.
- Your competitors could have gotten their acts together. OK, if your rank dropped by a few hundred spots, it’s probably not your competitors, as that would mean a lot of competitors getting their acts together at the same time! But if you’re just being outranked by legitimate competitive activity, then it’s time for you to work on your site. And this work includes optimizing for, and tracking, additional keywords.
- Is there something funky going on with your homepage, but not other pages? We’ve seen sites that have suffered big rank drops because their homepage had been deindexed due to redirect or canonical issues, and no other page had as much power as the homepage, so no other page on the domain was making it into those previous ranking spots. If you’re seeing only a portion of your site in the index, run through the diagnostic steps above to see if you can figure out why.
- Is your website new? Sometimes, websites show up in search results briefly after being launched, but then seem to drop dramatically out of the rankings after a couple of days, and are stuck in the depths for months. It’s a phenomenon that some have called the “Google Sandbox.” How to get out the sandbox? Get some inbound links to your site, and be patient.
- Is it possible that something has dramatically changed on your website? Say, you intended to update a single page but accidentally changed the page titles on every page of your site? Don’t forget to check your site and make sure everything is in order.
- Could you be seeing different results because your personalization has changed? We’ve known people who thought their ranks were phenomenal – only to be brought down to earth when they realized that the ranks they were seeing were personalized just for them by Google. Read more about Google search personalization.
Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas about how to track down the source of your site’s disappearance from Google. Regardless of what you find, it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re offering lots of great content that makes people want to link to your site, and do some link building. In this way, you’ll have other sources of traffic that makes a Google problem like this less devastating.
{ 39 comments… read them below or add one }
I think it is very improtant to wait and have patience first. A lot of teh times I have seen that my websites rank fluctuates and comes back to its usal position in a few days. In any case any steps you take should be gradual.
it took me 2 years to get respect from google, so it just hard word and dudication
Well,
fro me it`s been nothing but struggle. First page, then disappear, first page again, then disappear again. It’s really spoiling my enthusiasm and I think it makes the whole marketing sort of random. Very frustrating working with google…
My site was always on page 1-3 in Google for 3 months with my keyword but since last month it has been dropped and disappeared even thought till 1000. There are no errors on Google webmaster but I saw on Google Analytic, it’s graphic has dropped with red indicator. I don’t understand yet, Why?
Please help me, …or do you know low cost SEO master to fix mine?
Thanks.
My site dropped out of Google for all my keywords today!!
Slight panic which is why I read your article.
Will try and relax and wait a few days to see what happens.
Thank you
Robert
My site has a PR=3 and great alexa reading. Was listed on google for our keywords on page 2 for months. I just checked and our site has disappeared for no reason. I do all the SEO for it and have high quality backlinks pointing to the site. Also checked on google for site:ourdomain name and have over 5000 listings on google. Does anyone know why our site has suddenly disappeared off GOOGLE!! Looking forward to a positive answer asap! Thanks
Hi there, my site was on page 2 for our keywords for 6 months, has a PR = 3 and was dropped for no reason to page 35-45!! Overnight!! I have gradually built links to the site for at least 8 months naturally. My site is 86% optimised and was performing very well. Will relax for for a couple of days and see what happens. Very discouraging running SEO to build a business and then be thrown out!! We were all far better off with the good old yellow page index as a hard copy as oppose to this BS!! Internet Technology and the introduction of the mobile phone!!…im sure i have many people backing me on this.. and assistance would be greatly appreciated cheers
my site was ranking on 7 page on my main keyword and now i cannot find it at all..
in all other keyword the results are ok.
my site does does not show up in googles when is search with keywords, I used to show up in the first page.
My ranking for one of my keywords is still ok but for the main keyword it has completely dropped off! I hope this sorts itself out soon.
with in 2 weeks i manage to make my site appear in the first page of google in the first 5 lines. today my site simply desapear from google. but i check and im not banned, i didnt spam at all. trying hard to find out whats happening, ill follow your instractions and just wait a bit. i checked as well the robots.txt and .htaccess files but all looks normal.
good luck to you all.
I am feeling a bit better after reading this. Does excessive blog posting on do follow blogs cause a problem, is this considered spammimg ?
Google just reduced my dental insurance site — http://www.californiadentalinsurance.com from #2 to #42 basically putting me out of the individual dental business. I have a seasoned site since 2000 and paid the domain thru 2018. I have not made anychanges and the web site sells exactly what it says. Anybody with some helpful tips?
Dr. Blunt
I am incurring the same kind of ranking changes. It’s very frustrating when you work hard to try and correctly build your website the way Google wants you to, achieve good rankings as a reward for playing the game right, to then for no reason, have your site disappear or be shoved WAY back in the rankings while displaying sites that aren’t even relevant and on topic, what a slap in the face. I don’t understand what they want anymore. They are not doing their job very well when they display results that are not relevant to the searchers query, which is their purpose. I sure hope someone on Google’s end fix’s their algorithms soon.
it happened to me my site was ranking # 3 for a specific keyword but its disappeared from the search result not dropped but not sowing in the search result so i am going to wait a couple of days and keep sending back-links to it hopefully its just a temporary thing
My site is have same problem. Totally disppear from Google serp.
I do provide useful content and building link slowly.
I’m right there with you all. My site was doing really well for the keyword that matches my URL http://www.businesscasualshirts.com, then out of the blue, I disappeared! My site is still indexed (so presumably not banned), but is not showing up for my primary keyword. So frustrating.
My site dropped off google search completely for all my keywords, even when i search the full url,.
However, many internal links are showing up in the SERP for some reason.
My linkbacks are increasing though because i’m doing article marketing and link marketing.
Hey last days my site dropped, i had about 1250 visitors a day, … now its only 200 a day. I think this becomes because i had added a new functionality to the site > about 1000 new pages at ones to the website,
i have removed the functionality hopefull i get my ranking back. (and my google adsense income)
We’ve gone from page 35, up to page 4 and then it’s disappeared altogether. I shall put on my goggles and go search google.
http://www.thesheffieldcleaners.co.uk/
Where are you???
The same happened to us. Thank you for your advise.
We’ll try to relax, wait and see, but it is very annoying that this people from google are playing games with so many businesses. This seems to us like search manipulation by google to get people to advertise with them when in low ranking.
It happened me as well. We need to be patient. It will come back. Two days back one of my site http://www.theitjobs.co.uk disappeared from first page for some keywords. Now, It appears again.
We have great sucess with an SEO company for the last three years. BUT we have spent a lot of money to get there. What would happen if we dropped our SEO company? or changed to a new SEO company? Will our search results drop?
Changing to a new SEO company will not cause your search results to drop. SEO companies do not “control” the placement on any search engine. The idea behind SEO is that you’re building your website as an asset. If you build a solid position, it is difficult to take that position away. I wouldn’t recommend dropping an SEO company altogether unless you plan on using a different company. While positions can’t be “turned off” by an SEO company, positions may slip without continual maintenance.
We’ve seen this many times where an SEO company will try to hold you hostage to their services by claiming your results will dramatically drop. You would be smart to remain on some kind of maintenance program, but don’t worry about your SEO company pulling the switch.
I created a fresh blog for my site and submitted the blog post to social bookmark sites, then my site completely disappeared from 4th place ranking. I cannot even find it on page 10. Can the blog has anything to do with the dropped ranking?
I have been doing seo for about 6 months and I am pretty damn good. I have noticed on the new sites that I have worked on have fell out of the SERPS for weeks. I did heavy backlinking and I am here to tell you that after about a month those sites are moving between 1 and 2 and I am pretty happy.
I would say just be patient as they will come back
My site before 400 DuoGe record Google but one day these records are all gone, I was sad to Google to submit their said my website is unqualified, to know that I have been very hard to do my website how can not qualified? http://www.tuomg.com who can help me to analyze analysis?
I was on page one for my keyword for 3 years, then on page 2 for 1 year, now gone for last month. Not even in top 10 pages now.
Google is evil and a monopoly and should have this inordinate power cut down. No one company should have more than half of all searches on the net.
Worst of all my ranking has been replaced by pirate sites that steal my content and give it away for free. I then started paying Google for Adwords of 1500-2000US per month but that didn’t work.
I look forward to Google being cut down by anti-trust laws and Google & Youtube being forced to not violate people’s copyrights coz right now they are breaking every copyright law ever made, it’s just that the laws haven’t caught up to technology yet, but they will. Thanks
Good to read it has not happened just to me. Page 2 for over two years, and now dropped to page 12, all of a sudden. Very frustrating …..
Vivian
the same has happened to me recently, my site has dropped from page 1 for all our main keywords to pages 3-5
this was just after we bought a Forum profile links package from an SEO company, be warned!
sorry I posted this first with a keyword and not my name so just reposted it, you can delete the first one
my site was on page one yesterday for it main keyword on google, now it’s nowhere. absolute pain. biggest worry its an ecommerce site and it’s coming up on christmas.
i have been always on the first page and always in top 5 in a highly search volume keyword. lately i’m experiencing some crazy movement. sometimes i’m at first page though not at top 5 and sometimes i couldn’t find my site for the same keyword. it happened to me before also that i had to be patient to become stable at top spot again. hope things will get better soon
I have changed my blog from http://opiniibsvi.blogspot.com to http://opinii.biz and after this my rank dropped from 3 to 0 and my visits from 5-4 000 a day to less then 800 and is still dropping. Please help my!
Hi Dexro,
You might find something useful here: http://www.yourseoplan.com/website-redesign-seo/
If the switch was very recent, there’s a chance this is just a temporary drop that will resolve itself. Be sure to look at Google Webmaster Tools for both sites and make sure Google is able to crawl both the old & new URLs (if you lock Google out from crawling the old URLs, then it will never see your redirect). I would also very carefully check that you don’t have any issues with robots indexing or canonical tags on the new site. Lastly, is your new site geotargeted the same way the old one was? If Google has become confused about the geographical location of your site, that might result in a loss of traffic.
Good luck!
My site ranking dropped all of a sudden the first week of Nov , and till now it stays at low ranking for the same keywords it used to rank well for before that date. nothing significant was done that might have caused this in my mind, any ideas regarding Google rules?
Hi Mohamed,
This article includes my top ideas for your situation, so do be sure to look through it and see if any of these issues are a possible explanation. There was an algorithm change that rolled out around the time you started having problems: Google’s expanded freshness criteria. Here is the blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html . It’s possible, since your site is on Egypt, that Google decided to bias toward fresher News-style content for queries related to Egypt, because there is so much going on in the news there right now.
Gradiva
Have experienced it with one site regularly. For no apparent reason will rank well for about a month then vanish for a few days and then reappear! Looking on the web numerous webmasters report the same but cannot find anyone giving a reason why.
My website was ranked on the first page for many keywords related to Vedic Astrology. The hosting company’s server crashed and my website was unavailable for 48 hrs. Yeah, I have switched webhosts now. Google penalized me for having no 503 page informing them of service unavailable status. How could I, there was a hard drive failure ! None of the keywords when searched bring up my website in the search result. Only the new pages that have a different name are gradually showing up and climbing up the rankings. Obviously, this isn’t my fault but google does not care. All I can do is build new pages and work on SEO for those to generate traffic and orders. It has been over 3 weeks now and there is no apparent change. In Yahoo and Bing my website is ranked in the top on the first page for the relevant keywords. Thank you Google
My website was ranked in top 10 but suddenly dropped i.e. not found in whole the list of google SERP