8 Common Reasons Why Your Website Has Disappeared from Google Results

No one can feel worse than a website owner who suddenly realizes their website is missing from Google. It’s such an unpleasant feeling knowing that you put in a lot of work and effort and accomplished some ranking. As you expect to work on improving it, one day, you find out it’s not on Google anymore.

Before you start panicking, take your time and think about what to do. Which steps do you need to take? How to avoid getting stressed so that you can resolve the issue?

The only essential step to bringing back your website is determining the reasons why it happened. When you know that, it’s up to you to find the solutions. 

For the purposes of this article, we suppose that you have a WordPress website.

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:

1. Your Website is Not Indexed Yet

Google needs time to spot a new 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 the whole thing carefully. In ideal cases, you will wait a few weeks until Google (and other search engines) index your website.

In the meantime, you can face some events, such as the website appears then disappears from search results or something like that. It’s proof that something is happening, and you just need to be patient.

Your new WordPress website may need additional plugins to help you submit the URLs, so check all the options before considering this a problem.

2. You Prevented or Disabled Googlebot Crawling

Many website owners don’t do this on purpose but accidentally. So, one of the most obvious answers to your question, “Why has my website disappeared from Google,” is to check if you blocked Googlebot from accessing your site. Also, check if you somehow disabled Googlebot from crawling the robots.txt file.

That means you will have to check on the robots.txt file manually or with Google’s testing tool. If you find unusual directives, then you need to remove or replace them and give Googlebot permission to crawl your website.

3. You Maintain a Poor Backlink Strategy

Low-quality inbound links may decrease your ranking or even make your website disappear from search results. We are trying to say that if you accept attractive offers like 100 backlinks for just a few dollars, chances are all of them won’t meet Google’s quality standards.

As a result, Google penalizes your site, so it won’t appear in search results. If your website disappeared from Google recently, even though you are working hard to rank it, check your backlink strategy, and try to detect if something is harmful to you.

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 is maybe the worst-case scenario because it means losing all the work and effort for nothing. But, the valuable lesson you can learn is to always take care of the website’s security before officially launching it.

But how does it happen? Vulnerable websites are a nice target for hackers. They use malware or malicious code to get to your website and then infest it with spammy content, low-quality links, and even viruses.

At this point, Google detects something malicious is happening and completely de-indexes your website. This is another possible answer to your bitter question, “Why has my website disappeared from Google,” it takes quite a time to decide what to do to resolve it.

6. You’ve Migrated Your Website

Website migration to a new domain is a common practice, but it may result in temporary disappearance from search results.

You can wait for a few days to see if it gets back in the search results. Keep in mind that you may rank lower now, but if you proceed with your best SEO practices, it will soon get back on track.

If your website doesn’t reappear in search results, you need to resubmit it again through Google Search Console.

7. Low-Quality Content and Negative SEO Tactics

Google loves helpful content and appreciates it when you publish specially-tailored blog posts, articles, manuals, guides, and product descriptions. Ensure you follow Google’s helpful content updates to keep up with the best content practices.

Additionally, when you overload your content with keywords or create doorway pages, you can face penalization instead of ranking.

The negative or black hat SEO tactics go against Google guidelines. Even when you think you are doing it with style, don’t forget that your actions are easily detectable by search engines.

This is another common answer to your “Why has my website disappeared from Google” question.

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

Google updates the algorithm pretty often. As a serious and dedicated website owner, you must keep a step with these updates. Use all the Google tools available, including Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

This way, you can easily detect which update affected your website and why it disappeared from Google search engine pages.

Many successful businesses update their content and SEO practices accordingly. Your strategy from a few years ago was perfect back then, but now it’s quite irrelevant. This is another reason to embrace the Google algorithm updates and re-tailor your website accordingly. It will surely reappear once you resolve all the issues happening at the moment.

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.