subject: Removed From Google Index Time To Panic? - Part One [print this page] Most of the time when people worry that theyve been removed, or deleted from the Google index, they havent. Its just that their rankings are too low.
But this was different.
I really had been removed from the Google index!
How did I know? Because I did a site:www.mywebsite.com search and I was told that my search did not match any documents.
I confirmed this by checking my Google Webmasters account and, sure enough, it confirmed that, for some unspecified reason, Google were no longer indexing my website.
Time to panic?
Of course not!
Ive been listing sites in Google since 2001 without any problems so it was unlikely that something in my standard SEO practice was fundamentally flawed. And besides, Im one of the Lucid SEO team so Im supposed to know what Im doing.
I calmly considered the problem.
But, to be fair, this was not so much down to confidence as it was to the fact that it was a new website that hadnt been in the index for long anyway. It was off to a bad start but, since it wasnt getting traffic from the search engines yet anyway, I wasnt missing out on much.
Not yet anyway.
I knew obvious violations such as cloaked text (putting keywords on my pages that are the same colour as the background) or pages (showing Google one thing, and human visitors another), doing mass scale reciprocal linking with no thought to theme or quality, were among the more common reasons for getting booted out
But I wasnt doing anything like that.
A quick scan of Googles, Webmaster Guidelines refers to programs that automatically submit your site to the search engines, or check rankings.
I use SEO Elite, but have been doing so for years without any problems and, of course, I have my Google API Key (back when Google was still handing those out). So its unlikely to be that.
Theres always duplicate content of course, but all my content was brand, spanking new, and most of the articles were long, so that also made a template issue seem unlikely.
And I certainly wasnt doing anything with viruses, trojans, doorway pages, etc.
Design, content and technical guidelines are a bit more ambiguous. I mean we all know a useful, information-rich site when we see one, but its still somewhat subjective.
So what then?
Well let me tell you the setup and see if YOU can figure it out.
The website in questions was a wordpress blog ThePayrollBlog.com. Newly built, customised and setup with a nice variety of plug-ins. For about two to three weeks, new content was being added at the rate of 5-10 new articles per week. Some were press releases that may appear on other websites, but these made up the minority of pages.
