10 Common Reasons Why Your Website Has Disappeared from Google Results

Discovering your website is missing from Google can be terrible for any owner. After investing time and effort into improving its ranking, suddenly finding it absent can be discouraging and frustrating.

Before you panic, it’s crucial to assess the situation calmly. Identify the reasons behind the disappearance first and then focus on solutions. If you’re using WordPress, this guide will help you navigate the process.

So, if the question is what are the issues that caused your website to disappear from Google search results, we have some answers as part of the ultimate WordPress SEO audit checklist.

But before auditing your website in details, ensure it’s not some of these problems:

1. Your Website is Not Indexed Yet

Google needs time to spot a migrated or completely redesigned website and index it accordingly. Sometimes, when you use a different template, it changes the page URLs, so you need to adjust carefully. In ideal cases, you will wait a few weeks until Google (and other search engines) index your website again.

In the meantime, if you see your website appear, then disappear, and get back again, it may be a result of crawling and indexing the pages. It’s proof that something happens, but it needs time until the website is back.

2. You Prevented or Disabled Googlebot Crawling

Accidental actions like blocking Googlebot or disabling its access to your site could lead to your website disappearing from Google.

To revert this, check your robots.txt file manually or with Google’s testing tool. If you find any unusual directives, remove or replace them to allow Googlebot to crawl your website again.

3. You Maintain a Poor Backlink Strategy

Accepting offers for a large number of backlinks at a low cost might seem like a huge win, but these links could be of low quality and fail to meet Google’s standards.

As a result, Google may penalize your site, causing it to disappear from search results. If your website has recently vanished from Google despite your efforts to improve its ranking, review your backlink strategy and identify any potentially harmful or spammy links.

4. You Overused Google Search Console Removals Tool

You can hide or remove specific pages using the Removals Tool when you have access to Google Search Console. But, it would be best if you completely got used to how to use these tools to prevent a catastrophe.

So, next time you ask yourself, “Why has my website disappeared from Google,” maybe you have to check if you’ve de-listed your page yourself. But the good thing is that you can undo the removals using Google Search Console, even though you may need to wait to recrawl the site again.

5. Check if Your Website was Hacked

A hacked website can be devastating, causing you to lose all your hard work. However, it serves as a valuable lesson to prioritize website security from the start. Vulnerable websites are often targets for hackers, who infiltrate them with malware or malicious code, resulting in spammy content, low-quality links, and viruses.

When Google detects such malicious activity, it removes your website from its index. Once again, this scenario highlights the importance of addressing security issues in a timely manner to restore your website’s presence on Google.

6. You’ve Migrated Your Website

When migrating your website, sometimes it may temporarily vanish from search results. Initially, you should give it a few days until Google scans the website and indexes it.

Also, it may initially rank lower than before, but in a few weeks, you’ll probably have the previous rankings back (or even better). If your website doesn’t reappear within a reasonable time frame, you should resubmit it through Google Search Console.

7. Low Quality or Duplicate Content and Negative SEO Tactics

Google loves useful content, and the recent algorithm updates are all about it. Ensure you have great blog posts, articles, manuals, product descriptions, and guides. Don’t rely on AI tools for this; the human touch is still the best. Keeping up with the updates and quality guidelines ensures you publish great content and avoid unethical SEO tactics.

Duplicate content can also be a problem, so ensure all your pages are unique, and you don’t copy from other resources, just to have some content.

If all the technical challenges are fixed and you still have problems bringing back your website after it disappeared from Google, take your time and review the existing content and the applied SEO practices.

8. You Don’t Keep up With the Most Recent Google Algorithm Updates

Google often updates its ranking algorithms, trying to fight against bad SEO and writing practices. For quite some time, they’ve been improving and reviewing the improvements in order to “serve” only the best resources to searchers. So, sometimes, the website’s sudden disappearance means it doesn’t meet the new update requirements.

Successful businesses adapt their content and SEO practices to align with these updates. What worked well a few years ago may now be outdated. Embracing Google algorithm updates allows you to adjust your website accordingly, resolving any issues and ensuring its reappearance in search results.

9. Security Issues You Didn’t Fix on Time

Security vulnerabilities can be a risk to your website visibility, as well as one of the reasons why the website disappeared from Google search results. From hacker attacks to security issues that trigger Google to de-index your site, you need to spot the problem and fix the loopholes.

With regular site audits, you can spot those vulnerabilities and prevent further attacks. By maintaining a secure environment for your website, you can prevent Google from de-indexing it and maintain its search engine visibility.

10. Significant Changes in Content, Design, or Navigation

It’s normal to edit your website content, adapt the design, and improve the navigation structure. Still, these actions sometimes confuse Google. If you experience a sudden website disappearance from the search results, maybe the website revamp can be the reason.

These actions cause inconsistencies in indexing because the search algorithms love consistency. Still, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t improve your website – you just need to take planned steps and execute them carefully. Remember, sudden site alterations without proper optimization can temporarily remove the website from the search results. However, once Google re-crawls the website, it should be back. The only problem is that it sometimes takes weeks, and many of us aren’t patient to wait that long.

Do the Reasons Behind Your Site’s Disappearance Get Clearer to You?

Knowing all these things, you may have so many questions. How do I get my Google page back to normal? What have I done wrong in the first place? Why is my page missing from Google Search even after I resolved the ongoing technical issues? Do I need to implement a stronger SEO strategy to keep my ranking higher?

Most of these questions don’t have simple answers, but what helps us determine the common reasons is the tech audit template and resolving the issues step by step. You may have to incorporate this step into your practice, and check on the website issues more often than you do it now.

Final Thoughts

“Why has my website disappeared from Google” is a more common question than you can imagine. Knowing that many other website owners face similar issues allows you to believe that you can resolve most of them in a matter of time.

You can do it yourself, but you may have to consult experts for some aspects. Finally, the goal is to have a great website that ranks, converts, and sells, and search engine disappearance is not what you really need at this point. Use this article as a guide to help you determine the reasons for disappearance, and avoid the same mistakes in the future.

FAQs

Can I resolve the issues that make my site disappear alone?

You can resolve some of the website issues that depend on you. But, in many cases, you will need a complete technical audit performed by a professional to detect the reasons why your website disappears from Google search results too often.

What are the most common reasons for website disappearance from Google search results?

From technical issues to negative SEO tactics, there can be so many reasons for de-ranking or even complete website disappearance from Google search results. Even though we covered many reasons in this article, you may need an extensive audit to detect them precisely.

Can I bring back a penalized website?

If you fix the Google penalties, you may bring back your website. But be careful because it takes a lot of time until you resolve the detected issues. Even when everything is resolved, you may still have to wait up to six months until you implement the best SEO practices and let Google index the site.