If you are asking this question you are probably not in a very good mood. Google doesn’t really email your site admin to tell you the domain has been de-indexed. If you check your Google Webmaster Tools account frequently, you may have received such a notification. Still, the news that your site is in trouble is akin to being called to the principal’s office. Guilty or not, you are asking yourself, “What did I do wrong?” Many times, these problems can only be fixed by experienced SEO Utah companies.
What Does It Mean If My Website Has Been De-Indexed?
When your site is de-indexed or penalized, this essentially means that the search engine has decided to ignore your site when it crawl the world wide web for results to search queries. Thus, even if someone has just searched for your keyword phrase, you will not show up on the SERP, even if you are 100% perfectly optimized for that keyword.
Google is always adjusting their guidelines for quality content. As the king of Internet searches, Google must continue to deliver the highest quality search results. As SEOs continue to find ways to work around Google, the big G must constantly update their algorithms so that some rogue SEO doesn’t mess up their business of delivering the best search results. This means, that while Google may have been fine with your site last year, the most recent algorithm update may have bumped your site out of the results.
What Did I Do Wrong?
There is any number of things that can get you on Google’s naughty list. Google has criteria for the technical, content, design, and other quality guidelines that must be followed. Google’s take home message for quality websites is that your site needs to be valuable and offer the World Wide Web something it does not already have. The keys to this are:
- Publishing new, original content
- Easy to read content that is not stuffed full of keywords
- Having your robots.txt up to date and your sitemap submitted
What To Avoid
- Scraping content from other websites
- Participating in link schemes
- Spam
- Anything sneaky that won’t help your users
- Anything automated
How To Recover From De-Indexing
What was ok with Google yesterday may have gone out the window today. So, if this happens, you need to take action to get your site out of the penalty box. Make sure you have your site registered with Google Webmaster Tools. If you do, then you may be able to fix what went wrong. GWT sends you messages if something went wrong with your site. By following GWT instructions, you should be able to put your site back on the Google Index.