Deindexing Issues This 2022 & How To Solve Them

2022 has been an unpredictable marketing year. Companies, in particular, reported their web pages disappearing from search results. We’ve discovered that several of our clients are seeing multiple URLs tagged as not indexed on Google Search Console (GSC). If you’ve experienced the same issues, this post summarizes Google’s official response (and the online community’s uproar) about accidentally dropping pages from search. Plus, we’ll share the steps we’ve taken to reindex those pages.

Google Confirms a Deindexing Issue July 2022

Complaints started pouring last July 16th. Google announced the issue with search via this tweet:

“Yes, We are still experiencing the whatsapp mobile number list index issue. None of our sites are indexing, Please fix this major issue.”

There were reports that pages, previously ranking very poorly, suddenly appeared on the top of SERPs.

Luckily, Google replied with a follow-up tweet announcing they’d identified and fixed the issue the same day. You can view the complete thread on Twitter here. Unfortunately, once a page is deindexed, it’s up to the website owners to take steps to queue the page(s) for google to prioritize indexing it. Search Engine Journal’s post confirmed that the issue was about indexing, not SEO ranking.

Yet Another Deindexing Issue Arises in August

whatsapp mobile number list

On August 9, Google had a significant outage from the Google data center fire that triggered another round of pages dropping out of the index. The errors were widespread, and it was impossible to send a request in GSC to index anything.

John Mueller of Google was quick to respond by making a post and replying to comments. By the next day, things Buy Lead were back to normal for users but not for site owners. There were reports of mixing keywords or new ones coming up on their Semrush account. In extreme cases, entire websites were completely de-indexed (making them invisible in search results). Needless to say, there’s been some scrambling to get important pages back into the index.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *