Why Are My Pages Being De-Indexed?

Naturally, you were experiencing the deindexing problem (which means that some Google guy must have declared your site as spammy and kicked it out of the index).

Possible reasons:

  • Accidently blocked the page with the robots meta tag/ robots.txt (check webmaster tool for messages – also check for crawl errors)
  • All internal links to the page down as no-follow
  • Penalized by Google for breaking their guidelines, e.g., cloaking, paid links, etc.
  • Building up too many backlinks in too short a time
  • Not actually being de-indexed but dropped low in the SERPS (use the site command to double-check). Perhaps duplicate content or slow loading speeds have pushed you down.
  • Hosting multiple sites on the same hosting account, i.e., a problem with one domain, affects all.
  • Canonicalization and duplicate content issues
  • URLs don’t exist in sitemaps.
  • Ensure code written all in HTML or XHTML and DOCTYPE declaration is upper case

 What to do:

  1. URL Inspect in Google Search Console
  2. Address the possible reasons, i.e., make sure robots aren’t blocking the page, etc.
  3. Gain links at a steady pace, so Google knows your site is still active.
  4. Re-submit to webmaster tools and ensure you follow the guidelines

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