A new article on Search Engine Journal reports that Google's very own John Mueller just discussed some different ways that Google removes websites from the search index.



This happened on one of the latest Google SEO Office-hours hangouts. Google's John Mueller answered a question from someone who had their site deindexed and lost their rankings:

The person noted that for the past few days, the keywords returned to the search results for a few hours and then would disappear, said they checked Robots.txt, and checked the sitemaps and verified there were no manual penalties.

Mueller began his answer by speculating that the deindexing isn't connected to updating the Yoast plugin from the free version to the premium version.



Mueller also offered insights into the deindexing process. He also discussed a slow deindexing of parts of the site but not the entire site. What he describes next is a partial deindexing.

However, the person asking the question hadn't experienced a slow or partial deindexing. His problem was a total site deindexing. Mueller hinted at one possible reason why a site might experience a complete deindexing.

Mueller went on to suggest the problem could be a technical issue, a site quality issue, a spam issue, possibly a hacking event.