8 Possible Reasons Why Google Is Deindexing Your WordPress Website

Google has spoken extensively about the website’s de-indexing, although not very transparently. For example, we know that non-compliance with Google’s quality guidelines may be grounds for de-indexing. If the website is ahead of users finding genuine and relevant information, it might take a hit, too.

Google also says it can index websites if it believes it’s legal. Not sure if Google will let you know if that’s the case, but it can certainly warn you if you’ve violated some of its quality guidelines.

So if you can’t find your website in the search results, your first reflex should be to go to your Search Console and check if Google has sent you a description. You should have no trouble finding a way back to good grace if it exists – if that’s an option.

However, if you don’t know what the causes are, here are some possibilities that you should have fun with:

Your Content Was Too Thin

Because it’s Google’s mission to provide valuable and important content, these are the things you should post if you want it to be indexed by Google. If you don’t, you risk the de-index penalty.

From a researcher’s perspective, removing weak content should help drive more relevant results for a search query. The type of content that Google considers “too thin” is bad content:

From Google’s perspective, it should be clear why these pages don’t contribute to the ecosystem it’s trying to develop.

You Have Been Hiding

Concealment is not something you can do by accident. To remove, You should be able to show a version of your web page when they visit the Google crawler, and then a completely different version of the page to a person visiting the website.

One way to do this is to show an HTML page to the search engine and serve only the photo and Flash animation to the visitor. If you are using content that is commonly used in hiding, you must ensure that the content is appropriately accessible.

You Were Part of the Binding Plan

Adding links is a common technique to increase PageRank. However, there is a pretty long list of things you can do wrong in the process, and they include but are not limited to:

The remedy and strategy for getting links is to create great content. There’s nothing like great content to get people to link to your website. If you can find original research, an expert review, or an article with unique insights, you can build links organically.

Your Website Has Hidden Text and Links

Now how did this get there? In some cases, hidden text on your website may be there for good reason. For example, image alt text is hidden text with no malicious intent. Video content may contain explanatory text. These are all examples of hidden text that aren’t bad.

However, there are examples of hidden text and links that are clearly used to deceive the reader, Google, or both:

While the first few examples of hidden text—the ones that aren’t bad—may simply require you to do something different and fall back to Google’s grace, deceptive behavior is a one-way ticket to deindex city.

You Host User Generated Spam

As a website owner or administrator, what you hide in your website comments is your responsibility. If you start receiving too many spammy comments, it will be up to you to react accordingly.

Clear signs of spam infestation include spammy accounts, spammy comments on blogs, spammy posts on forums. Do your best to remove these posts and you can do a lot. If you can’t keep up with spam, you can moderate comments or disable them altogether.

You’re Secretly Redirecting

Creating referrals is an integral part of having a website. Sooner or later you will have to create redirects for some reason. There are many legitimate reasons to do this – after changing hosts or removing pages or making the standard version of the website appear in search results.

But if you’re showing something to search engine bots and then redirecting users to see something different, it’s a sneaky redirect. You may also be sending different types of users – mobile users, for example, to a completely different version of the website from desktop visitors. Either way, what you’re doing is wrong and you can de-index your website for it.

You Only Do Bad Things

A page that tries to inject malware, spyware, or trojans into a visitor’s website should be de-indexed. A page that hides real buttons behind fake buttons to record users’ unwanted clicks is another reason to de-index your website. Injecting ads, adding unwanted files to downloads, and setting a different browser homepage are all signs of bad behavior that you should not have indexed.

You Accidentally Deindexed Your Website

Sometimes it’s not Google that is de-indexing your website – it could be you. Earlier this year, the SEO community was stunned to learn of this. LinkedIn has been temporarily removed from the index from google. It only lasted a short while, but still kept the community entertained and guessing possible causes.

Most reasons why Google removes a WordPress website, or any website for that matter, are downloaded by website administrators on their own. The LinkedIn situation was a little different, probably because they either deleted the HTTP version of the website or deleted it from Search Console – still a bug, but not one that caused Google to react. In this case, website administrators have indexed themselves.

let’s hug

Many websites depend entirely on the traffic they get from Google for their livelihood. In that case, something like de-indexing can have a terrible effect not only on the website but also on the people who run it.

To avoid being indexed, it’s always best to follow Google’s t guidelines. Staying in the tech giant’s grace is what needs to be done, and in that case, it will be hard to see how a decent creator would fare against these measures.