8 Possible Reasons Why Google Deindexed Your WordPress Website
Google has spoken extensively, albeit not too transparently, about website deindexing. We know, for example, that failure to meet Google’s quality guidelines might be grounds for deindexing. If the website is in the way of users finding genuine, relevant information, it might take a hit, too.
Google also says that it can deindex websites if it believes it’s bound by law to do so. While it’s not sure whether Google will let you know if that is the case, it definitely might alert you if you’ve broken some of their 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 sent you an explanation. If it has, you’ll have no trouble finding a way back into its good grace – if that’s an option.
If you don’t know what the reasons were, however, here are some possibilities you should entertain:
Because it’s Google’s mission to provide valuable, and substantial content, that’s the things you should be publishing if you want it indexed by Google. If you fail to do so, you risk the penalty of deindexing.
From a searcher’s perspective, removing thin content should help get more relevant results for a search query. The type of content Google considers “too thin” is bad content:
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Automatically generated content – gobbledygook with an occasional keyword thrown into the mix.
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Thin affiliate pages – pages that add little to no value because they usually only contain product descriptions.
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Scrapped content and low-quality guest posts – content that’s not created by you but you hosted it and it’s thin.
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Doorway pages – pages that might lead to the useful final destination but are not themselves useful.
It should be obvious why, from Google’s point of view, these pages don’t contribute to the ecosystem it’s trying to foster.
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Cloaking isn’t something you should be able to do by accident. To pull it off, you have to be able to show one version of your webpage to the Google crawler when it visits it, and then a completely different version of the page to a person visiting the website.
A way to do that would be to show an HTML page to the search engine and deliver nothing but photos and Flash animation to the visitor. If you’re using content that’s commonly used in cloaking, you should make sure that it’s properly accessible.
Adding links is a common technique for increasing PageRank. There’s a pretty long list of the things you can do wrong in the process, however, and it includes, but is not limited, to:
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Buying or selling links or being part of an excessive link-exchange ring.
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Using automated services to create links for your website.
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Creating unnatural links, such as links embedded in widgets and distributed to other sites.
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 get some original research, an expert roundup, or an article with unique insights, you just might end up building links organically.
There are Hidden Text and Links on Your Website
Now how did that get there? In some cases, the hidden text on your website may be there for a good reason. Image alt text, for example, is a hidden text that doesn’t have a bad purpose. Video content can have descriptive text. These are all examples of hidden text that’s not bad.
But then, there are examples of hidden text and links used clearly for purposes of deceiving the reader, Google, or both:
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A font size of 0.
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Text that’s been positioned off-screen with CSS.
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White text that’s written on a white background.
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Linking a small character to hide a link.
While the first couple of instances of hidden text – the ones that are not bad – might simply require tyou to do something different and get back into Google’s good grace, the deceptive behavior is a one-way ticket to deindex city.
As a website owner or administrator, what you keep in the comments of your website is your responsibility. If you start getting a lot of comments containing spam, it will be up to you to react accordingly.
The telltale signs of an infestation with spammers include spammy accounts, spammy comments on blogs, spammy posts on forums. Do what you can – and you can do a lot – to remove those posts. You can moderate comments, or disable them completely, if you can’t keep up with the spam.
Creating redirects is an integral part of having a website. Sooner or later, you’ll have to create redirects for one reason or another. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do so – after changing hosts, or after removing pages, or to have the canonical version of the website appear in the search results.
But if you’re showing search engine bots one thing and then redirecting users to see something different, that’s a sneaky redirect. You might also be sending different types of users – mobile users, for example, to a completely different version of the website than desktop visitors. Either way, what you’re doing is wrong and you might get your website deindexed for it.
A page that’s trying to inject malware, spyware, or trojans on a visitor’s website should be deindexed. A page that’s hiding real buttons behind fake ones to register clicks the users didn’t intend is another reason to get your website deindexed. Injecting ads, adding unwanted files to downloads, and setting a different browser homepage are all signs of bad behavior that should get you deindexed.
Sometimes, it might not be Google who’s deindexed your website – it could be you. Earlier this year, the SEO community was flabbergasted when it found out that LinkedIn was temporarily deindexed from Google. It lasted for only a short while, but still kept the community entertained and guessing for possible causes.
Most reasons why Google would deindex a WordPress website or any website for that matter, are brought down by the website admins on themselves. The LinkedIn situation was slightly different because they probably either deleted their HTTP version of the website or deleted it from Search Console – still an error, but not one that caused Google to react. In this case, the website admins deindexed themselves.
Let’s Wrap It Up
Many websites are entirely dependent on the traffic they get from Google for their livelihood. In that case, something like a deindexing can have a horrific effect on not only the website but the people running it, too.
To avoid getting deindexed, it’s always best to follow Google’s guidelines to the t. Staying in the tech giant’s good grace is the necessary thing to do, and in this instance, it would be hard to see how a decent content producer would have anything against these measures.
