Search engines have become a key source of driving traffic for websites over the web. Either accidentally or deliberately, getting deindexed from Google can make your website disappear from the search results and will take away almost all the traffic. There can be various reasons that can push Google to remove a website from its search index.
White-hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the only approach that can give you optimum results for your website. Activities such as keyword stuffing, duplicate/poor content, cloaking pages, link errors and other mistakes are going to draw the attention of search engines towards you and can even lead to a penalty.
Why Did Google Deindex Your Website?
There can be two major reasons why Google deindexed your website. One can fall when you have taken manual action on your website. Another occurs when you accidentally made an error in the code of a site. In case of manual action, you would have got a notification in the Search Console. This can happen when you break certain guidelines of Google’s webmaster. It is important to follow the guidelines carefully to maintain a good position with Google.
Common Reasons for De-indexation and How to Recover It
1. Adding unnatural links to/from your website can deindex your website from Google. Poor quality guest posts, inbound links to your site, spam blog commenting, participation in purchased links, and other similar things can adversely affect your website’s traffic.
Solution: When you received a notification for unnatural links, it is better to do an audit on your backlink account. In this procedure, you have to determine the natural links and take out the spam ones. Ultimately, you will get a list of unnatural links that are required to be rejected. In the end, submit your disavowed file and file a reconsideration request while asking the steps to fix the damage.
2. Duplicate, auto-generated, poor content and write-up having grammatical errors can immensely affect your rankings on the search engines.
Solution: If you are a part of auto-generated practice or non-original content production, you may probably aware of what pages it is harming. Whereas it can be quite daunting to recognize duplicate content pages. You can simply use an SEO crawler to reveal such kinds of pages in less time. Once you find the error containing pages, you can spend some time to develop fresh content or remove the low-quality web pages.
3. When you provide Google and its visitor’s two different sets of URLs or content, this is called cloaking and this can lead to a manual action against a site. It is often happened accidentally by the user. When your site has content behind a paywall for followers, it might appear as cloaking. The other harm can cause when your website has been hacked.
Solution: This can be rectified by running a quick scan on your site to find out and resolve the susceptible pages. You can use malware software to clean up the irrelevant files. Once cleaned up, you can file a reconsideration request while asking the steps to recover the violation.
4. There are basic guidelines to apply structured data. If you failed to use such guidelines, it may result in manual action and can certainly deindex your website.
Solution: When you receive notification for manual action, you should first take a look at some common causes of spam structured markup to fix it accordingly. The other method to recognize and fix the issues is to use a structured data identification tool. Once the fixing is done, submit a reconsideration request.
Getting deindexed by search engines is undeniably worse news. But it doesn’t mean that your world has ended. You can simply take some steps to recover your site as soon as possible. Always remember to begin with the identification of irrelevant activities and rectify the issues that made your site deindexed. Then request Google to re-index your website while transforming your SEO efforts.
