Every website owner hopes that their website will be displayed on the first page of Google for multiple keywords. Sadly though, there are times when a website or any particular web page or pages are completely thrown out of the Google search result page. Here we will discuss a few of the main reasons why a website is removed from the search engine’s result page and what you can do to fix this issue.
Your website is very new
Google finds a website and tries to understand the content through a process called crawling. The content is then indexed and when a user enters a related search query, Google displays the most relevant web pages. When your website is very new, it will take a few days or even a week for Google to find your website online and crawl the content. The time taken will also depend on how frequently the keywords related to your website content are searched for.
How to submit your website to Google for crawling?
The first thing you need to do after you launch your website is to submit the website’s sitemap.xml file to the Google Search Console. For this, you need to sign in to your Google Search Console account, verify your website and then submit the website’s sitemap.xml file URL.
To check if a particular web page is crawled and indexed, you can login to Google Search Console and type in the URL of the page inside “inspect any URL” box and click Enter.
The page will then be displayed showing that crawl status of your webpage.
If the coverage status says ‘not indexed’, then follow the next step to see how you can resolve this issue.
Site is not indexed (or any one web page is not indexed)
All the pages in your website have to be indexed to let Google bots crawl your website content. If you have set that status to ‘no index’, then Google will not crawl and index your website and hence your webpages will not be displayed in any of the Google search result pages.
How to make your site get indexed?
As discussed in the above point, using Google search console, you will know if your website is indexed or not. If not, then you will need to check the source code of the website and change the ‘no index’ to allow the page to get indexed.
If you are using a WordPress website, there are options on each of the pages and posts where you can set the page to no index if you do not want that page to appear in the search results.
A page could be set to ‘no index’ for several reasons. Please make sure to check with your digital marketing team the reason why they have that page set up the way they do on your website before you make any changes.
Site is penalised
Google sends out notices to websites that don’t adhere to Google’s search engine guidelines. Many websites that follow Black Hat and Grey Hat SEO principles get punished by Google which results in a part of their website or an entire domain being thrown out of the search results.
Recovering from such an action is possible but it takes time as Google sometimes is not very clear in letting us know the exact reason for such an action.
What to do if Google penalises your website?
Always follow White Hat SEO guidelines for your websites. Doing so will take some time in helping the webpages to achieve top rankings but it is worth doing if you want your website to stay in favour and in the search engine pages.
If you have received any manual action from Google and this has affected the ranking of a part of your website or your whole website, then you will need to commence a thorough research through your past activity on your website history in terms of content changes, meta tags and backlinks and try to identify the issue as soon as possible. Once you have identified the issues and rectified them, you can then submit your website back to Google to ensure the penalty is lifted. This is easier said than done, but we can help your website get through this with the help of our Search Engine Optimisation team.
Irrelevant content
Writing content is not easy, but it is the most important reason for anyone to revisit your website. If a website has thin, duplicate and copied content, no user will visit your website again. The same can be said for the content the search engine bots crawl through. If bots crawl your website and find that you have written content that does not match the title and the whole concept of your website, they will probably remove your webpage from the results page to make way for more useful informational websites to take your website’s place.
How to write relevant content ?
Hire a content writing team to help you write meaningful content if you are not a natural writer yourself. Content writers specialise in writing correct and optimised content for your website. Also make sure you don’t buy into bad practices like keyword stuffing to avoid a penalty.
Are you facing any problems in terms of website ranking, optimisation, Google penalties or manual action and content writing? Contact us today for a FREE consultation to let you know how we can help you to achieve better website ranks and traffic.
