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)
“Need some help to understand this better, the goal is help increase page vital so that ranks better. What I am seeing in GSC is that they have many pages that is crawled but not indexed, they have been in the industry for more than…”
“Hello, I manage a large e-commerce website in the adult niche. After a major cleanup and restructuring of the catalog, visibility was recovering and the number of indexed pages continued to increase. Then, in a single day, Google Web impressions dropped by 80–90% across product pages, collection pages, and blog articles. We checked everything: No manual action or security issue No sitewide noindex tag, robots.txt block, or incorrect canonical tag Pages are still indexed and crawled The number of”
“My main page targeting a head term will not get indexed. GSC shows "Discovered, currently not indexed", last crawl N/A, so Google has never even fetched it. What I have tried: Live Test is green (URL can be indexed), self canonical, in sitemap, internally linked from nav, footer and body, requested indexing multiple times over weeks, and recently got an dofollow backlink from a real agency blog pointing directly at the page. The odd part: I have a city-specific page ("keyword + ci”
“Hi guys, recently over past 2 weeks our SEO has tanked hard, over 100% drop in impressions, now thing is I checked our indexed pages normally its up and down, we normally going up with indexing compared to deindexing, however past 2 months our indexing completely flatlined we aren't getting any new indexes or deindexes and we are confused as hell. Right before this drop we had one of our biggest impressions and highest clicks ever and we been getting boatload traffic throw AI such at GPT and”
“Large multi-country gambling/review site. On July 17, impressions and clicks dropped ~95% overnight. This isn't just a reporting issue. Our rank tracker shows most money keywords falling positions and ending up 101+. More concerning: searching for our brand name or URL doesn't show the site either. The only way to find pages is with a site: search. What I've confirmed so far: No Manual Actions or Security Issues in GSC Pages are still indexed (URL Inspection shows indexed, self-canon”
“Hi everyone, I'm having a strange issue with Google Search Console. I added my brand-new website to GSC less than a month ago. Since day one, every time I try to request indexing for a page through the URL Inspection tool, I get a message saying that I've exceeded the indexing request quota. The weird part is that I've never successfully submitted a single indexing request . Every attempt has been blocked by this quota message. "You've exceeded the indexing request quota. Pl”
“So I just ran it on my project and got an F and interested to pick your brain on how important it is for my use case. All of my pages are listed in the sitemap but most aren't found during the crawl because the primary UI is a search box. Should I be putting links between search result pages just to increase the number of internal links to help with SEO? Is there a penalty for not doing this?”
“honestly the TOC thing works but i don't think it's the session-duration part? google's said a bunch of times they don't use time-on-page from analytics as a ranking signal. on my end what actually helped was the little jump-links showing up under the result, plus people not bouncing straight back once they can see the answer's in there. did he test where it sits btw, top vs a sidebar?”
“Hello! I have a website, but when I search it, other pages (eg, Instagram, Youtube, even the biography page) are all appearing before my homepage. In fact, my home page isn't even appearing on the 1st page of Google at all! My website is Wordpress. I have Yoast SEO, and Google Search Console. Any help would be appreciated. FYI, I know my way around these sites, but I am no Pro. For the most part, self-taught. So please be specific on what and where to make changes, because I may not know. &#”
“Brutal but fair. I ran your site through a TTFB test from a few locations and the initial response is consistently slow, which points at uncached pages hitting your origin rather than your frontend being the problem. If you're behind a CDN, check the cache status header (cf-cache-status / x-cache) on a few pages; if it's mostly MISS or DYNAMIC, the edge simply doesn't have your pages before visitors arrive. That's the exact thing I built warmup.rocks for (per-location cache warmi”
“I have 13 pages on my website but only 5 show up when I search for **site:example.com** which makes me think that pages aren't indexed. When I check the pages in the Search console only 5 pages show as indexed. When I inspect the URL of the remaining links it shows as indexed. Just stuck with what to do next. Can I start working on new keywords or do I need to do anything to get the other 7-8 pages indexed as well? submitted by /u/Affectionate-Tea3834 [link] [comments]”
“This is why SEO feels harder now. It’s not just about getting indexed anymore, it’s about whether the page actually helps someone”
“Does anyone else experience search results completely disappearing or becoming highly limited when choosing to sort by a certain metric, like highest price? This has been happening to me on the app for a long while now and it’s quite frustrating. I’m wondering why this happens. Will they ever fix it? Can I do something to fix it? Or can we tell them this doesn’t work? submitted by /u/carefreekelsher [link] [comments]”
“Started taking SEO seriously on June 1st. Since then I've done at least an hour on it every day and haven't broken the streak once. Small niche site I built myself. Here's roughly where I'm at, since the start (48 days) in Search Console: 155 clicks, 8.9k impressions. Average CTR 1.7%, average position 24.6. Around 14 keywords ranking, all of them sat between position 11 and 50. Nothing in the top 10 yet. DR is 7. About 10 referring domains, and most are nofollow, so realisticall”
“so i'm doing seo for my site, picking low kd keywords, building pages around them, and then just... waiting. waiting to rank, waiting to see if it lands in the click zone. and something it takes too long to see results and it's something we cannot control. and something things get tricky. i'm starting from 0 basically. sometimes it just doesn't happen and we need to start again. my actual question is how do you undo this stuff properly, like how do i deindex those pages, build ne”
“Hi Everyone, I am involved with two niche job sites. Board 1 launched in Feb and the content grew relatively organically, 8000 indexed pages in GSC, appearing in search results. Board 2, inherited the same codebase from Board 1 (identical SEO setup) and was launched in April, but targets a completely different niche. It was indexed nicely at first ~200 pages indexed, then google suddenly pulled it back to just 2 in June. Since then it has never recovered any indexed status. I believe that my mis”
“I'm doing redirections in SEOPress *Pro* and I can do .htaccess, too/instead. In SEOPress, all destination URLs are correct in the Redirections tab. In SC, it says URL is not on Google, but that it can be indexed. The Live URL goes to the correct page. ----------------- **The site had a different domain at the beginning. The client wanted to use a different domain. I've done a 301 domain redirect in SeoPress Pro and .htaccess. ----------------- SC says there's no referring sitemap de”
“Sorry if this is the wrong subreddit, I don't know where else to ask for help. Whenever I try to add my site map google says "Could not fetch" , I leave it days, weeks, months and it says the same. If I use URL Inspection in GSC I get the error "Something went wrong, If the issue persists, try again in a few hours" When I try to use Rich Results test , I get the same error. If I try to create a new Sitemap, different path entirely - exactly the same issue. Both tools can”
This is a bit of a rant, yet it's one I think is rightly deserved.Over the last several months, Google has exploded with:* extreme delays in rendering search results* popups of captcha…
“Yesterday I was stressing because I was trying to change things around using Claud AI to understand our Wordpress website further (it was done years ago, and hasn’t had updates in a long time). Yoast was on there (some bubbles were grey, red, and or green), so idk if that’s been set up right, or not. But yesterday (or even the day before) I had turned off Yoast (disabled it), and then turned on Rank Math, cause at one point both were on. I don’t think I did a migration with Rank Math, tbh. Sudde”
“Have meta titles and descriptions set up correctly and have had Google re-index which it says in search console was completed but all of my pages meta titles and descriptions are not what I have in the metadata. It’s been 3 months, is there something else I could do beyond wait? submitted by /u/AskCool7269 [link] [comments]”
“We've noticed something strange with our site. Twice now we've been hit by what looks like spam backlinks (hundreds of low-quality .store domains, autogenerated names, etc.). After submitting a disavow file, we saw a very noticeable recovery in traffic almost immediately. Whether that's coincidence or not, it made us realize we need a better way to monitor backlinks and overall SEO. What tools do you actually recommend nowadays for: -Monitoring new backlinks and possible spam attacks”
“Quick context: 10+ years of experience with Digital marketing but first time trying to do SEO. I published the website 4-5 days back and it took some time for Google to Crawl and index my website. However within a couple of days I'm getting impressions on the 3-4 page and even on the first page on some keywords. Is this a common scenario, from what I've heard it takes at least a few months for SEO efforts to show some results. These seem to be early signals of my effort. How can I capita”
“My site has historically been very strong on Bing, indexing and ranking within 30 minutes for over 1.5 years. Suddenly, as of Sunday night, all new articles I’d done, many of which were ranking number 1 on Bing, were removed and not showing up anymore. Everything past Sunday night is gone, and new things won’t show up, but everything before Sunday still shows up. Any idea what’s going on? Bing support is useless with boilerplate responses, and I’m really hurting here because they drove a lot of”
“How does Google's pageRank, RankBrain, and NavBoost scores factor in to your site's ctr? I'm looking into scale rankings as a way to improve my site's position on serps. So I was curious which scores are the best for those metrics?”
“I recently joined a company, and it has created over 10,000 pages based on location through programmatic SEO. From this March update, I found out that almost 60% of the pages are removed or unindexed. My founder has called me and told me to fix it, and I have been thinking about how to process this problem. Because scaling 10,000 pages and making them rank or getting a meaningful return is not an easy task, and I'm also a beginner. I want to get some opinion on how to create multiple pages w”
“I recently joined a company, and it has created over 10,000 pages based on location through programmatic SEO. From this March update, I found out that almost 60% of the pages are removed or unindexed. My founder has called me and told me to fix it, and I have been thinking about how to process this problem. Because scaling 10,000 pages and making them rank or getting a meaningful return is not an easy task, and I'm also a beginner. I want to get some opinion on how to create multiple pages w”
“Hi, my client's website used to rank on first page till last year but today when I was doing a random search, I didn't find the website.....what could be the possible reason? submitted by /u/Alternative-Job-8570 [link] [comments]”
“No, modifying the browser title dynamically after the page loads is not cloaking, and it is a safe, standard practice. Google ranks the page based on the source code it fetches and its initial rendering pass. It does not penalize sites for changing document.title via client-side JavaScript for user safety or user experience.”
“First off - I'm an SEO consultant, not a developer, so apologies if any of this sounds extremely stupid. But I think you'll quickly see why I'm asking here, and why I don't have experience with this particular challenge... ~~~ I'm consulting on a support and resources website for survivors of domestic abuse, and there's a conflict at the heart of the project I'd love ideas on. Essentially, people in crisis need to find these resources through search, so titles and con”
I was told that if you have a thin content penalty and using a WordPress site you should add the thin content to a separate category and no index that category. But…
Hi all, I’m an SEO consultant with 14+ years of experience (real estate, fintech, B2B marketplaces), and I’ve spent the last stretch solving one of the classic pain points of Bubble apps:…
“This website was done years ago, not sure how it was set up, but when I open wordpress, there is green and yellow circles under the page list, I assume from YOAST SEO plugin. I added Rank Math recently, and then read it’s not good to have both plugins (SEO) turned on, so I turned off Yoast. I’vd been throwing my website onto Claude and trying to tweak things like alt text, etc and meta description (I don’t notice the change. I don’t even think it even updated?) buf now I’m worried because did I”
“imo the internal linking from an already-indexed hub page is the most underrated move here. people sleep on that. for the AI citation problem, have you tried adding structured FAQ content targeting your category terms? that seems to be what the LLMs latch onto right now”
I setup a weekly schedule to send out and publish few articles to GitHub for seo content. App just launched a month or so ago, so still in the new area with…
“directories are just a temporary stat buff but google patches those seo exploits in basically every new build lol”
Is it just me or has performance improved? Previously I couldn’t get a blank page above 70 on desktop performance…now a blog with 5000 words, 7 photos and structured data is hitting…
“Solo-building a micro SaaS (a voice guide you embed in your product). Two weeks ago, I finally instrumented everything instead of guessing. It was grim: Domain Rating: 3 Google had indexed 3 of 27 pages. The rest sat in "Discovered - currently not indexed", which is Google's polite way of saying "you have no authority, we're not spending crawl budget on you". A week of X reply-guy (dozens of tailored replies on "drop your startup" threads): 4 visitors. Organ”
“This is a really interesting, almost once in a decade opportunity to listen to a Google Engineer talk about Google's spam and Quality systems. What gets discussed: Content Quality - what is it? Pedro: Quality is in the eye of the beholder There's no binary standard or checklist Some SEO Myths Backlinks Does Pedro Hint at needing organic traffic Scaled Content: from content spinners to AI PSEO Content Pruning? Diagnosing traffic drops And so much more submitted by /u/WebLinkr”
“I’m building an SEO strategy for a client. I started by identifying their core services (my seed keywords), then entered them into Ahrefs and exported the Matching Terms. Now I have hundreds of related keywords. What’s the next step? Do you manually cluster them into pillar pages, service pages, and blog posts? Or is there a more efficient workflow that agencies typically use? I feel like I’m overthinking this, and I’d love to know how experienced SEOs approach it. submitted by /u/Si”
“Hey all, I've worn two hats in SEO- ran my own blog for years, and separately worked as an agency owner managing multiple client sites. Same problem showed up in both, just at different scales. As a blogger, I'd publish a batch of posts around one topic, and then have no good way to see if the topic was actually working. Just a pile of individual keywords, each bouncing around on its own, telling me nothing about the bigger picture. As an agency owner, it got worse: Multiply that across”
“Thank you. The distinction between traffic and people with immediate booking intent really clicked for me, as did thinking of the SEO work as next season’s moat rather than something that has failed because it’s slow. The site is probably strongest on Corfu right now, where I have 36 verified beaches with practical details like surface, water conditions, parking, amenities and family suitability. I also have more detailed collections around pebble beaches, snorkeling and quieter beaches across s”
I'm a little confused about these two. I know a 404 means the page isn't there anymore, but what exactly is a Soft 404? Why does Google sometimes show a Soft 404…
Ah i built my website on Lovable and no clicks either! I’m not a software engineer or techy at all. Is there another way to fix this that I can do?
“Solo founder of an AI virtual staging tool (QuickStaging). Sharing this because "just do programmatic SEO" is everywhere and the missing caveat cost me months. The setup: ~1,000 room-type × design-style pages, plus city pages and competitor comparisons, in 9 languages. Technically clean, proper canonicals, hreflang, schema, all indexed. I verified: the pages ARE in Google's index. The result over the last 28 days: 0 organic visits total across all of them. My domain rating is 11. T”
“it's a sneaky one. I usually hit the page with a quick curl or the Rich Results Test to spot an empty shell right away.”
“Hey everyone, I’ve been doing some deep research on internal linking and PageRank distribution, and I wanted to get your thoughts on a strategy I'm looking to implement. As far as I know, Google’s "First Link Priority" rule means that if you have multiple links on Page A pointing to Page B, Google will pass PageRank through all of them, but it will only process and attribute the Anchor Text of the very first link it encounters in the HTML. Here is the thinkg: on my homepage, I have”
“Oof this hits on so many levels. I work as dev too and the client-side rendering trap is so real, it's like we're trained to think SSR is just an optimization not a fundamental requirement the part about telling yourself stories for 8 months... I've done exactly that with side projects. "oh it's just the algorithm" "people don't search for this in summer" meanwhile my entire site was basically invisible moving back with parents to extend runway is rough bu”
“Linking to older articles seems to be recommended. However, how about changing older content to link to newer articles? So basically article 1 -> article 2 -> article 1 (creating a cycle). My question is whether it is bad for SEO to use circular linking (either internally or even externally). submitted by /u/alo88startup [link] [comments]”
“TL;DR: It's been a while since I started a new site, so I'm starting something from the ground up. It's a topic I have a lot of fun with, but Google's understanding of the search intent of the keywords I want to target seems to have recently taken a turn for the worse (or better?), and SERPs change almost weekly. In this niche, evergreen content is a lot of work at first, is highly competitive, and generally has lower volume. Seasonal content takes less time to write, is less com”
“Mostly manual in a Sheet for now: page/query, signal, suspected cause, action, change date, baseline clicks/impressions/position, and a revisit date. I’d only add automation once the site is large enough that a weekly GSC export plus anomaly alerts saves real time; a dashboard can surface candidates, but I’d still keep the decision log manual so each change has an owner and hypothesis.”
“Hey, thanks a lot for this , genuinely appreciate you taking the time to check and share a report, that's rare to see in comments Will go check the www vs non-www setup right now.”
“I’d start by ignoring 80% of it. GSC is great at making you feel productive while you do absolutely nothing useful. My rough filter: high impressions, low CTR: rewrite title/meta around the actual query intent position 5-20: improve the page, add internal links, maybe split out a section if the query deserves it page dropped but impressions dropped too: check indexing/seasonality before touching copy clicks dropped but position is stable: SERP changed, title got worse, or intent moved The import”
“Be aware of compliance you may need for screen readers and if your website uses the meta pixel for any kinds of user tracking.. run seo reports and such to make sure your site is compliant. Plenty of scammy law firms will sue you for non compliance”
“Yup it’s very likely a fluctuation issue as I’ve experienced something similar before. I gave it like 2-3 weeks and it sorted itself out.”
“Thanks for the reply. Honestly, I have almost no SEO experience—this is the first project I've ever built. I originally created it as a tool for a friend, so when I saw it getting a surprising number of impressions for those queries while sitting around position 80, I probably read way too much into it. Sounds like I still have a lot to learn about how SEO actually works. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain it. Your explanation makes a lot more sense than my original "uns”
“Hello professionals! I am new to SEO stuff and my website focuses on a react full page components and full website templates on modern frameworks like MERN stack and Next.js. If anyone has idea regarding faster growth then it will be very helpful for me 😇 Site: templatescenter submitted by /u/RipRevolutionary3382 [link] [comments]”