The impact of having pages of your site deindexed

According to Google, the pages of your site will be deindexed if they are down for a few days, no longer appearing in search results. Learn how to avoid this deindexing, the possible impacts of it on your search engine positioning, and the consequent impact on your site traffic and your business.

João Amador
Jan 18 2022 • 2 min reading
The impact of having pages of your site deindexed
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If you have some knowledge about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and use it in your web content production strategies, then you work daily to be relevant to searchers and rank high in Google's organic search results.

Using the relevant keywords and the right terms related to the main subject matter in all your content is one of the most important premises for ranking well in a search.

How to avoid being de-indexed

  • Keep your eyes wide open;
    Always check that your pages are working properly live, make sure there are no bugs and plan recurring inspections to keep you up to date;
  • Fix problems as soon as possible;
    If you need to fix something on your website, try to do it as soon as possible, and use a 503 result code so that Google will "know" that it is a temporary outage and check back.
  • Have a Plan B, i.e. if you have to do planned maintenance always have a stable version that you can put online with the help of your support team.
  • Make sure you have a "page not found" with a CTA for the Home;
    So if there is a page of your site down, or that for some reason has been removed, the link in the search engines will direct visitors to a second page not found with a call to action button that allows them to return to the site's homepage.

Be aware that if you have one of your pages de-indexed for more than just a few days, it is not guaranteed that when you are back online, the page will rank exactly as it did before. You may experience strong fluctuations for some time before you get everything back.

The implications of being de-indexed

It is important to keep in mind that a deindexed page or a floating Google ranking can result in fewer site visits, less traffic, and multiple effects on indexes beyond page views, namely your site's page rank in Google may drop.

There are many other indexes that can be impacted, such as lead conversion, new business opportunities, and consequences in breaking links on other internal and external pages that had links to the de-indexed page.

In short, being de-indexed by Google is bad news, but it's not the end of the world, if you take action quickly your site can recover, start by identifying and fixing the problem that caused your site to be de-indexed, then there are Google index request mechanisms to speed up the re-indexing of your site while doubling your SEO efforts.

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