Why did my site disappear from search engines?
When you have a site from which you make money, and it surprisingly disappears from Google and other search engines, this is a reason for concern. Before we panic, it's a good idea to check a little more closely to be sure something bad has happened. When we know more, we will know how to act, right?
Check if the site really crashed?
How are you sure your site is missing? If you search for a specific word and it is usually on the first page, but now it is not, it may mean that it has moved back in positions. Did you check if it still doesn't appear on the second, third or back pages? If your answer is yes, and you're sure you can't find your site, try this.
Search Google for the following: site:domain.com
Write your domain in the place of domain.com. Do not place any characters between the colon and the domain.
If your site still appears in the google index, you'll see all the pages that Google has indexed. If there are results, that's good news. Apparently you have not disappeared, but just a process of rearranging the results. What is the reason for this is another topic that we will address in other articles.
If you don't get any results from this search, then your site has indeed disappeared from Google.
If your site just disappeared, try to remember what could have caused it? Did you happen to use SEO services of dubious origin? Did you want fast results for a fee? Have you taken any actions to edit your site in the last 1-2 months?
Everything can lead to such shocks, but the reasons are most often the following:
1. The site has attempted to manipulate the results or the so-called BlackHat SEO. This process involves unregulated actions, which often lead to extremely good results, but when they are established, the domain is blocked and instead of success, the exact opposite effect occurs. If you've resorted to this, we regret to inform you that your site may never appear on Google again.
2. The site has undergone an update in which someone unintentionally blocked search engines. Sounds absurd, right? More absurdly, it happens to us often, especially when web developers block Google and all search engines in the working version of the site so that it is not indexed. It is extremely common when copying the working version online, forgetting to remove the lock. So a nice, new site with a good rating starts to gradually disappear, day after day from Google, until finally the owners find this out through the dropped traffic. This is most often done through robots.txt (to see if there is such a thing, just go to your www.youdomainname.com/robots.txt). If you do not have such a file - this is a problem, but not critical. If you have, and there are various commands that prohibit search engines - often this is the problem. The other way to block site indexing is through a line added to the site’s code. This is more difficult for the average user to understand, but still try - right-click on your website, select View source (do not be afraid, you will not break anything). The code may be incomprehensible to you, but look at the top for something that looks like the following code:
<meta name = "robots" content = "noindex">
It may have different variations, but if you have NOINDEX on your site - you have a problem because you explicitly tell the search engine not to index you.
If you want to always know what the status of your site is and periodically receive advice on how to improve it - register in BoomSEO. We review your site manually, and constantly alert you if something goes wrong.
