Loading ...It’s the nightmare you usually only hear about. One morning, you check in with your site on the search engines to see how your SEO campaign is going, and you can’t find it. You look around, check in with it directly to make sure it’s still up and running, and you find no answers. As far as it seems with the search engines, it’s simply gone.
This is one of those search engine optimisation problems that fits in with both the ‘Worst Problems Ever’ and ‘Most Easily Fixed’ lists. It fits onto the latter because most often, the cause is something very easily fixed. Every SEO expert has a long list of sites they’ve retrieved after fixing a simple miscommunication with the search engines or a website optimisation technique gone wrong. The issue fits onto the ‘Worst Problems Ever’ because sometimes, fixing it is not so simple.
If this problem happens to you, the first thing you need to do is sort out whether your site has actually been pushed off the index. It’s an easy erroneous assumption to make, and thousands of people have made it before. There are plenty of resources out there for checking whether your site has been sandboxed, penalised or otherwise punished. One way you can check is to search for your URLs individually in the search engines. Your site may not have entirely disappeared, or the disappearances might be due to a change in the algorithm. It’s also a good idea to talk to a professional when this occurs, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about page disappearances.
Even if all your pages are gone, there may be simple answers. Check your server logs to see whether there has been a problem at the very heart of your site. If the search engines trawled your site when it was down, there may have been a problem. Another area to look at is your robots.txt. As these things affect your communication with the search engines, there is a remote chance that they could have had some part in your problem.
If you can’t find an innocent reason for the change, there might be a not-so innocent one. Any site that has undergone search engine optimisation must always be aware that there is a chance they have crossed the line. It might be something you’ve done on your pages, or it might be something that has happened off your pages. In either case, you need to fix it.
The problems that cause sites to be removed from the index are fairly well known. Tracking down which one caused your particular issue is another matter. If you’ve engaged the services of an SEO expert, it’s time to rely on their expertise. If you’re going it alone, there’s a lot of legwork ahead of you. In this case, it’s important to make sure all of your information on SEO is up to date, so date-check any articles you’re relying on and cross-reference.
The only way out of this kind of hole is solid hard work. It’s unfortunate, but true.
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