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
-
Can a page that's 301 redirected get indexed / show in search results?
Hey folks, have searched around and haven't been able to find an answer to this question. I've got a client who has very different search results when including his middle initial. His bio page on his company's website has the slug /people/john-smith; I'm wondering if we set up a duplicate bio page with his middle initial (e.g. /people/john-b-smith) and then 301 redirect it to the existent bio page, whether the latter page would get indexed by google and show in search results for queries that use the middle initial (e.g. "john b smith"). I've already got the metadata based on the middle initial version but I know the slug is a ranking signal and since it's a direct match to one of his higher volume branded queries I thought it might help to get his bio page ranking more highly. Would that work or does the 301'd page effectively cease to exist in Google's eyes?
Technical SEO | | Greentarget0 -
Google search console showing canonical issues
I have a problem , canonical tags present in my web pages, but still google search console showing canonical issue for example check this page https://kilid.com
Technical SEO | | ParastooDezyani0 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
404 not found page appears as 200 success in Google Fetch. What to do to correct?
We have received messages in Google webmaster tools that there is an increase in soft 404 errors. When we check the URLs they send to the 404 not found page:
Technical SEO | | Madlena
For example, http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg
redirects to http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml.
When we used fetch as Google, here is what we got: .
#1 Server Response: http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:26:59 GMT
What is wrong and what shall we do? The soft 404 errors are mainly for images that no longer exist in the server. Thanks!0 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
My site was Not removed from google, but my most visited page was. what does that mean?
Help. My most important page http://hoodamath.com/games/ has disappeared from google, why the rest of my site still remains. i can't find anything about this type of ban. any help would be appreciated ( i would like to sleep tonight)
Technical SEO | | hoodamath0 -
Google place listings and search results- quick question.
Has anybody else noticed that they are ranking better on 'places' yet they have dropped off in the actual search results? We've had no message through webmaster tools. The same seems to have happened to our competitors.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Existing Pages in Google Index and Changing URLs
Hi!! I am launching a newly recoded site this week and had a another noobie question. The URL structure has changed slightly and I have installed a 301 redirect to take care of that. I am wondering how Google will handle my "old" pages? Will they just fall out of the index? Or does the 301 redirect tell Google to rewrite the URLs in the index? I am just concerned I may see an "old" page and a "new" page with the same content in the index. Just want to make sure I have covered all my bases. Thanks!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0