Is your website indexed on Google? Does it have a high ranking? If you answered yes to both questions, then you need to continue reading. You might be enjoying a steady flow of organic traffic from Google right now, but it can go away at any time. Why? Well, it is the result of Google deindexing your website. Don’t worry because you can always get indexed again and restore your rankings to what they were before. But this will require you to go through a thorough recovery process. It will not happen overnight.
The Reasons for Google Deindexing Your Website
Google has a list of webmaster quality guidelines which they expect all webmasters and website owners to follow if they want to keep their website indexed on Google. Sometimes you might make a coding mistake while editing your website and it will cause your website to get automatically deindexed. Another reason is that Google has manually deindexed your website because it has been reviewed and found to not comply with their policies. Therefore, if you are trying to get indexed on Google, then you better learn their website guidelines first. That way, you will know how to prepare your website properly so that you don’t run into this situation.
Below is a list of the main reasons for deindexing which can help you get started:
1) Too Many Unnatural Backlinks
A backlink is when your website address is published on another website. The Google algorithm will rank websites better if they have relevant backlinks on other websites. However, if they have too many unnatural or irrelevant backlinks, then Google will think you are spamming your links just to get a higher ranking. For this reason, they will punish your website by deindexing it. Also, if you are exchanging backlinks with other webmasters, this will also raise a red flag with Google too. To fix this problem, do a search for all your backlinks on the internet. Look over them and see which ones are relevant to your niche and which ones are not. Make a list of the irrelevant backlinks and then disavow them. You can do this through the Search Console of your Google Account.
2) Unoriginal Content
Google only wants websites with original content. If you copy content from other sources and paste it on your website, you will be violating Google’s guidelines. Google will even penalize you for grammar and spelling mistakes too. Therefore, you should only write your own content or hire someone to write it for you. To ensure that it is original content, you can use a website like Copyscape to see what percentage of it is copied. Any duplicate or copied content will be shown to you. Then you can just edit it until you have 100% original content.
3) Cloaking Content
Some webmasters will do cloaking to try and fool Google. Cloaking is when search engine crawlers will see content that is different than what is actually on the website. The benefit of cloaking is so you can spam your backlinks or break other Google rules without their crawler ever detecting it. However, the cloaking method does not always work and many websites have been deindexed over it. Sometimes this won’t be your fault. For instance, if you are selling a subscription-based service where people must pay before they access a certain page, then it might be considered cloaking in Google’s eyes. You can remedy the problem by using “JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data” to indicate which page is supposed to be hidden content. Google gives instructions on how to do this. In any other case where it is not your fault, your website may have been hacked. Run a malware scan regularly on your website to detect any hacking on there. Then just try to put up more security features through your hosting provider.