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:
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"I own a site and it was ranking good before 23rd of March. I upgraded from Yoast SEO... free to premium. After that the site got deindexed from Google and we lost all our keywords."
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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.
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"I don't know... it sounds kind of tricky... I would say offhand it probably doesn't have to do with the updating of your plugin."
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Why Does Google Deindex Websites?
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.
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"But it could very well be a technical issue somewhere. Because usually... when we reduce the indexing of a site, when we say we don't need to have as many URLs indexed from a website, we tend to keep the... URLs that are more relevant for that site and that tends to be something that happens over... I don't know... this longer period of time where it like slowly changes the indexing."
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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.
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"So if you're seeing something where like the whole site disappears from indexing, it almost sounds like something that might be related to a technical issue... something along those lines."
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Mueller went on to suggest the problem could be a technical issue, a site quality issue, a spam issue, possibly a hacking event.
