Google Keeps Deindexing or Burying Your Site
Website owners are experiencing significant and unpredictable issues with their sites being indexed and ranked by search engines like Google. This includes large-scale spam indexing, sudden drops in impressions, and difficulty recovering trust after technical issues, leaving them feeling powerless against the algorithms and competing with Google itself.
SOURCES (60)
“My site pass the update with no change but starting sep 2 i see the impressions are almost same sligtly lower but in same range but clicks drops significantly. Anyone else see the same with their website or is it just with me??? For example…”
Create a collection, targeting a keyword that represents the products category. Redirect 404 pages to the collection to remove the issue with 404 chains.
Don’t delete the page! Redirect all that traffic to another page.
“Hi everyone, Probably many of us here have come across this issue with startup directories. Directories are great for SEO and organic traffic. The problem is that most of them (those outside of Product Hunt and Uneed) barely work for the traffic part. The reason is that on these platforms users have no incentive to come back after their launch. I myself am an avid supporter of launchign on directories. But this issue is one that many have. Because of this problem I wanted to come up with a solut”
“Over the past several days, I have been hearing from some publishers that while their content is being crawled, indexed, and served in Google Search results, some of it is missing from the news tab. It may then later show up in the news tab, much later. I was able to replicate this but it seems completely random. I asked Google about this last night on Bluesky but I did not hear back. My question was: Why would a page from WSJ show in the All tab but not News tab? Here is that example - showing”
“Hi all, My previous post was deleted, I don't know why so before deleting this one, please explain why first, I can adapt my question if necessary. === CONTEXT I see that many sites have been hit by the august spam update and at first, I thought I also was hit by this update except that my sudden drop happened before the update. I have a .com, .be, .nl and .de where I write genuine content (no AI) in 6 languages. My articles are spread across those domains depending on their languages (.com”
Hello Thanks for your help in advance. My relative's wordpress site got hacked and as a result many spam pages were created which also wound up in Google search console and Google.…
“Unfortunately a lot of people are seeing traffic drops/poition ranking in Google and looking for help! Don't worry - the r/SEO and r/SEO_Digital_Marketing community is here for you! But we need information. A % loss or saying you lost traffic isn't going to help us. You need to characterize or frame how you lost traffic - was it all pages, some pages, new pages, etc - was it specific keywords? Official Google Search Traffic Debugging Guide Use this guide to get started https://developers”
“As long as you don't create and attach a custom domain to your environment it won't be indexed so it won't show in search results.”
“First of all, google has explicitly mentioned multiple times that domain authority plays no part in crawling, indexing or ranking of page Second thing, you have almost 1k pages in your site means google has to spend a lot of crawling budget to your site, there is high chance that google is not crawling them on regular basis and thus those pages are not getting regular impressions and clicks. The reason behind this is probably thin content or an easily available information on an already ranking”
“Hi, any advice on how to increace my domain authority? For some context. Its currently 6, like 20 backlinks to saas directories with high authority, 969 indexed pages on google, audit with semrush to use keywords with a decent volume and low competition, I give free tools, guides, user docs, etc etc. But it seems that the most important thing is domain authority. I wonder if there is some way to make it go up fast or if the only way is to list in thousands of saas directories? My saas has been l”
“Google confirmed the goto rollout on Aug 26 — result links now pass through google.com/goto with an encoded destination. Nozzle's numbers: resolving all links for a single five-page ranking takes somewhere between 500 and 1,000 requests, because the encoded URLs can't be decoded locally and HEAD requests are blocked, so you're doing full GETs that follow every redirect. That's on top of num=100 going away last year, which already turned one request into ten. So the cost of produc”
“Crawl frequency and citation are different signals. A bot fetching a page for its index doesn't mean a model retrieves that page when answering a specific prompt. Old blog posts often get crawled more just because they've accumulated more inbound links over time, not because they're more likely to get cited. Worth checking whether the page actually gets pulled into answers, not just whether bots visit it.”
“Hey everyone, I have an SEO case have these 4 case questions: Traffic drop: Organic traffic drops 35% over a weekend. How would you diagnose it in the first 60 minutes? Cannibalisation: Two pages rank #8 and #14 for the same keyword. How do you determine which page Google prefers and fix the issue? Link building: A mid-authority casino site is entering Germany. What would your first 60 days of link building look like, including velocity and link types? Site migration: A major URL restructure + t”
“Domain migrations are rough and you're basically doing it twice in a year which is gonna confuse the hell out of google no matter what. The city level stuff being inconsistent screams that the.eu switch didn't fully propagate trust to all your local pages, some got left behind in the shuffle. If you still own the.be and it wasn't redirected to some spam site in the meantime, moving back probably won't get you a penalty but you'll eat another few months of dip. The 9 years of”
“In theory, yes. As others have mentioned, you don't even need to write any code, you can just run it. In practice, no: These days, many sites have started blocking crawlers. (See this post for some background.) A "useful" web index can be too large for one server. See Common Crawl stats. Real search engines have hundreds of thousands of servers.”
“If it gets too big you’ll have some hard-to-account-for security concerns edit; (the size doesn’t change the security concerns - rather you and your peers are juicier targets the bigger you get)”
“week two is where it goes, yeah. the tell is that people stop logging what they placed before they stop placing, so by the time they quit they cannot even see which of it was working. whatever you use, make the recording step take under a minute. it is the first thing to get dropped.”
“you're right and my post undersold it. i wrote it as though tagging closes the gap when it only closes the half you place yourself. the copy-paste case you named has a partial fix that survives it: give a channel its own landing PATH rather than leaning on the query string. a path survives someone copying the url out of the address bar and sending it to a friend. query params usually do not. it does not catch everything, it catches exactly the case you described. the how-did-you-hear field i”
“need to investigate, maybe it just needs some backside update or too many files too handle? in any case, the search needs to be fixed.”
“Yeah, the speed of iteration is real. I went the other way—started on a builder, then tried code. Hated it. One thing that helped me get better signal than just changing headlines was running blind polls with founders in my niche. LaunchPact does that, you drop your options and people vote without seeing the results until the end. Worth a look if you want to double-check which value props actually land before you commit traffic to them.”
“one more thing, since a few people asked me this the last time i wrote about tagging. if the placing is the part you keep skipping rather than the tracking, contentmation.com runs the placements across 7 social channels and 100+ directories and keeps the per-campaign analytics in one place. i am not saying buy it. i am saying the reason most people never tag anything is that placing links by hand is dull, and dull is what gets dropped first.”
“Looking for a sanity check from people who've seen this pattern before. Not asking for a site review, no links — just the data and what I did. The site - Gaming niche: launch-week guides, known-issues/fix pages, release countdowns. English + Traditional Chinese + Japanese versions of most pages (hreflang, static site on Cloudflare). - Domain went live Aug 6 (301 migration from an older domain). ~436 URLs. Near-zero backlinks, DR under 1. GSC, daily (impressions / clicks / avg position) Date”
“no robots.txt is written: crates/web/src/site.rs:78 emits the documents, the stylesheet and sitemap.xml , and that is the whole set. and open document ( crates/web/src/seo.rs ) writes title, description, canonical, open graph, twitter and hreflang but never a <meta name="robots" , and PageSpec has no key to ask for one. so a preview page, a thanks page or a print variant is indexed like everything else and listed in the sitemap besides. a [web.pages.<key ] index = false that writes noindex and d”
I have to be honest, I decided to ask here since SEO is still some magic (or may I say sourcery) for me. I created a site that works as a theater…
“For months (maybe years) I have seen posts about long lists of pages being sent to trash. I always discarded them as people who made a mistake without realizing it. until today. I had to log a possible birthday gift for someone. I tried getting to the right page, but couldn´t find it. I tried 5 times, still nowhere. That's when I went to the trash page. and to my surprise it wasn´t just to long lists of birthday gifts that I had been collecting for years about my friends, family and acquinta”
“Hi, I need some help after the Google spam update. Has anyone actually recovered from this one, or is it more of a "wait it out" situation? Curious if this is hitting specific niches harder or if it's pretty widespread. Would appreciate any input from people who've been through a SpamBrain hit before — trying to figure out if I should be auditing content, disavowing links, or just sitting tight. submitted by /u/No-Farm-2354 [link] [comments]”
“I’m seeing a "Discovered - currently not indexed" status in GSC for several pages. When inspecting them, Google shows only 1–3 referring internal links per URL. Is low internal link depth/page weight usually the main culprit here, or should I be looking closer at content uniqueness/value thresholds? Any insights or recommended troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/Enough_Charge2845 [link] [comments]”
“Why must everything get crappier over time?? submitted by /u/makemeking706 [link] [comments]”
“I'm wondering if Google penalizes sites with forced registration (especially if its crawlers can't find pages because of it). Is anyone having any luck with forced registration? submitted by /u/SuperPineapple7033 [link] [comments]”
“Small French single-product site : an online school training legal assistants (ajfr . fr). One keyword carries the whole business case, "formation assistante juridique" (400 searches/mo,). Right now most of the leads come from Google Ads.. I've been working this page for 6 months. Laying out everything, good and bad. I'd rather be told I'm wrong than keep guessing. Where it actually sits GSC, last 28 days Value Target page avg. position on the main keyword 15.7 (267 impress”
“Has anyone found a workaround for the new go-to parameters that Google rolled out around the 13th or 14th? Semrush is now having major problems tracking website rankings. I have gone back and forth with this issue, only to be told that there are no issues and that everything is working correctly. Treating me as if I am a newbie, even though I have been using the tool since 2010. I guess at the time they did not know what was going on . If you want to read up about this, Google "Confirmed: G”
“I run a small SaaS site in the “life administration for foreigners in Japan” niche. Visa, tax, resident registration, that kind of content, split between English and Japanese. Domain is under a year old. Historical performance, before the drop Japanese-language CTR in this space runs dramatically higher than English, something like 2 to 3 percent versus 0.1 to 0.2 percent on equivalent English queries, so the Japanese clusters were always the real growth lever. Early on, average position was sit”
“Hi, we're a UK based training business providing nationwide services. For context, we've owned our business domain for about 15 years and never did any SEO in the past. We re-launched our website at the beginning of July and have been actively building our topical authority and link profile which seems to be working - we've moved from 3 - 4 clicks / 120 impressions a day to roughly 35 - 40 clicks / 3K impressions a day since re-launch. We're trying to understand an issue with our”
“before any of the redirect work, export search console performance by page for the full 16 months and park the csv somewhere safe. after the move you will get a dip and no way to separate the migration from the content decay you already had. we skipped that once and spent weeks arguing about which one it was worth being blunt about the diagnosis too. traffic is falling because the content is out of date, and 2-3k static html files are already faster than wordpress will be without full page cachi”
“Have seen this with a lot of pages where the page initially gets impressions when published for the first 2-3 days and then doesn't get any impressions. Most of the pages are on the first page. Is there a way I could get regular impressions on those pages. Should I keep changing the content of the page until it starts getting impressions regularly? What is the reason why this is happening? submitted by /u/Affectionate-Tea3834 [link] [comments]”
“I'm trying to understand a significant ranking drop rather than immediately start changing things and potentially make the situation worse. My site lost a large portion of its Google visibility around the August 2026 update. Before the drop, a number of pages and queries had relatively stable rankings. After the update, many of them declined significantly. The site is still indexed and I don't have a manual action. What I'm trying to determine is whether the decline is primarily rela”
“had the same thing once. staging was indexed for months because nobody checked. now i grep wp-config for those two constants first, before anything else”
“everyone's right about the redirect map, but there's an option upthread nobody's raised that avoids most of it. wordpress permalinks can end in .html. settings > permalinks, custom structure /%postname%.html, and your 2-3k urls stay exactly where they are, so there's no redirect to chain and nothing to spot check afterwards. worth knowing what you're trading too: you're going from a file nginx hands over in tens of ms to php plus a db query per request. put page cachin”
“I run a small SaaS site in the “life administration for foreigners in Japan” niche. Visa, tax, resident registration, that kind of content, split between English and Japanese. Domain is under a year old. **Historical performance, before the drop** Japanese-language CTR in this space runs dramatically higher than English, something like 2 to 3 percent versus 0.1 to 0.2 percent on equivalent English queries, so the Japanese clusters were always the real growth lever. Early on, average position was”
“I run a small SaaS site in the “life administration for foreigners in Japan” niche. Visa, tax, resident registration, that kind of content, split between English and Japanese. Domain is under a year old. Historical performance, before the drop Japanese-language CTR in this space runs dramatically higher than English, something like 2 to 3 percent versus 0.1 to 0.2 percent on equivalent English queries, so the Japanese clusters were always the real growth lever. Early on, average position was sit”
“Top Story via u/rustybrick Google Search seems like it is rolling out the google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL within the search results that it began testing in July 2026 . This seems like a way for Google to help prevent scraping of its search results by third-party tools and AI companies, but Google has not yet commented on this goto URL parameter. Update: A Google spokesperson has now confirmed for us that this is rolling out and told us: "We have a long history of deploying technic”
“I've built a a searchable index of happy hours around Sydney which ends up with 2.5k pages in my sitemap. I was doing well for about a month but from the 13th of August impressions started dropping and now Google has basically de indexed the entire site so I can only find 9 pages now when searching. GSC still shows 4.3k pages indexed but I don't think it's caught up to the reality. I've aggressively no indexed any pages which were empty but I'm also seeing my high quality sea”
I have been working on this site for some months now but the domain is about 2 months old. Added it to my Google search console and it have been getting clicks,…
“Hello, I run a small site (solo, around a day job) that does punjabi song lyrics with line by line meaning and english translation. (kikehnde) I started in April and the it was going well through May. Was around 12-15k impressions and ~1200 clicks a day at peak in early June. The site barely had around 80 songs at that time. Then June 07 happened, impressions and clicks both dropped by ~90%. No manual actions, no security issues. I had a "word" feature that was basically an auto-genera”
“Hi! I have a web app that somehow started picking up users from Google about a week ago, even though it’s been live for around 8 months. I’ve done the usual SEO stuff, adding structured data, breadcrumbs, a Wikidata entry, etc. Though I keep seeing SEO people recommend submitting your product to “high-DR directories.” Does this actually work? And if so, why doesn’t Google just devalue these directories when their main purpose seems to be founders listing and linking to each other’s products? ”
“worth planning for at this size: if the redirect map lands as 3000 rewriterules in .htaccess, apache re-reads and evaluates that file top to bottom on every request, including all the ones that will never match. we lost a couple of days blaming a new cms for a ttfb regression that turned out to be the redirect file. put the map in the vhost config so it parses once, or on nginx use a map block, which is a hash lookup rather than a linear scan”
“Why do you need to "crawl" the front end of the website? This should just be html files in a directory or multiple directories. If you have basic terminal skills you can just `ls -R` in the web root and you have your SEO index right there. Then it's really a matter of just setting up 301 redirects to the recreated pages as they will no longer end with html or htm depending on your server setup. I am sure there is a trick to end WordPress paths to .html which could be interesting op”
“Just want to say setting up 301s to new pages is NOT the move. You will nuke their authority overnight. I personally think migrating to something like wordpress is a mistake in 2026. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that migrated away from wordpress a decade ago.”
“Yeap, agree with this. Basically search engines want to do as little work as possible so if you're able to say "this content still exists and its here" then they're pretty happy with that.”
“Hello, my web site was for sure penalised. I checked security, is nothing there but my website does not appear in serp even for main keywords. I ve check last days rank and went from 10 to 45. I have been using backlinks on the footer of some websites that I have been created and they went all the pages. All were dofollow. Probably google have consider this to be spammy. I went and change all to nofollow and I hope this to fix it. Anyone have same issue? And if yes, how you fix it, and how long”
“This site is a 10+ years old destination marketing site for a small city. No AI generated content and actively SEO'd for the last 3 years. By nature, the content and traffic is seasonal. We have pages for events, attractions, activities, food, hotels etc. and seasonal blogs or activity / event driven blogs. Normally if someone searches for "things to do in [the city]" or "events/attractions/activities in [the city", we would get organic impressions and clicks for the rele”