Deindexed

Being deindexed means that one of your pages, or far more worryingly, your entire website, has been removed from a search engine’s index, meaning that it no longer appears in search results at all.

This is a far more disastrous fate than simply ranking poorly on Google. If your page ranks on page 10 of Google’s SERPs, it’s still indexed. If, however, it’s deindexed then it’s simply gone, and completely invisible to anyone who would be searching for it, no matter what they type.

If you need organic traffic to grow your business, deindexing could be fatal to your lead generation.

What is Deindexing?

It’s important to know the difference between deliberate deindexing from the unwanted kind, because they’re easy to get confused.

Sometimes you’ll want a page to be deindexed, and can use a noindex tag to ensure that search engines know never to rank in their results pages. These typically include thank-you pages, internal search results, and duplicate or thin pages that wouldn’t help to attract organic traffic.

This form of deindexing is a perfectly healthy way to help your website continue to operate in a natural way.

Involuntary deindexing, however, means that the pages that you want to rank disappears, either because of a technical mistake or due to a Google penalty.

Why do pages get deindexed without your permission? Technical issues are usually the most common reason and thankfully the more fixable. The cause of these issues include:

Accidental noindex tags left on important pages, possibly copied over from a staging site by mistake

• Robots.txt files blocking crawlers from indexing your pages
• Canonical tags pointing pages at the wrong URL entirely
• Server errors making pages inaccessible to Googlebot

These errors can all lead to your pages dropping out of the index, and are surprisingly easy to make during site changes, which is why a website launch or migration should always include checking whether the pages you want to rank for are still indexable.

Paying the Penalty

The most serious case of indexing is a search engine penalty. If Google issues a manual action for serious guideline violations like cloaking, aggressive black-hat tactics, or a toxic link profile, it might resort to deindexing the offending pages or your website entirely.

This represents the strongest action that Google can take on a site, and the only solution is to fix the problem and then submit a reconsideration request.

Deindexing as a Google penalty isn’t a death sentence for your website. But while recovery is possible, the process can be slow. There’s also no guarantee that your website will be able to go back to the same ranking positions as before.

Diagnosing Deindexing

To get to the bottom of why your website’s been deindexed, you can use Google Search Console to run an index coverage report to see where problems have been flagged. Additionally, the URL inspection tool can let you know the index status of any specific page and why it could have been excluded, as well as checking the manual actions report would reveal whether a penalty has been applied.

Running a quick site search for your domain can also provide a sense of whether your pages are present.

The priority here is that if you find your important pages have been deindexed, you can quickly identify the cause and run a technical fix to restore things in a matter of days, while a penalty means a longer road to recovery overall.

Either way, regularly checking things can help you to catch instances of deindexing before it starts to cost you in lost traffic.