Google’s De-Indexing Issue – Not Fixed Yet!
Thursday last week, Google started de-listing many URLs from the index, and after lots of complaints from the webmaster and SEO community, I initially thought this was another Google uninformed update. So, as usual, I started looking into the test websites and found no pattern, and Google was literally de-listing many websites.
On April 6th, 2019, Search Engine Land published news saying that Google’s de-indexing issue was fixed. But now Google is saying that the issue is not 100% fixed, and they are working on re-processing lots of URLs.
How do you get your de-listed URLs back in the index again?
To be honest, there is not much you can do about it. This is Google’s issue, and they are trying to fix it; even if you do nothing, you will be back in the index pretty soon (in a couple of days). But what do these few days mean to your business? Especially if your money-making page is de-indexed.
Keeping Google’s general indexing nature, I think a couple of things will, hopefully, increase the re-indexing speed of your de-listed URLs.
Note: I am not going to cover common tactics like using fetch as Google or utilizing your crawl budget efficiently. I think this is something which you should have been doing. However, I am trying to share ideas that will give extra signals to Google and push the index to crawl websites more efficiently.
Here are some of the ideas:
Ping Service
It’s not really the best idea, but I have seen this working from time to time. Plus, it’s free. Simply go to the Pingo-matic website and include information, and it will ping a range of different services. Search engines will get notified when the website is updated. Because Google is missing some URLs that you have on your website, chances are that you will get indexed quickly.
Internal Links
Another idea could be internal links. Search Engines crawl from page to page using HTML code. If you have only a few pages indexed in Google. Try to add some internal links to pages that are de-indexed, and this will give an extra signal to Google and push the crawler to index the URLs with more signals.
External Links
External Links, which are from a page that is already indexed in Google, will be a strong signal to not only re-list the URL in Google index but also pass the link juice that can result in better rankings on Google from the target key phrases.
In that case, Guest Post, in particular, might not work, but in-content URLs will be a great help.
Update Site Map
Another good idea is to update your website’s XML sitemap and resubmit it in the Google Webmaster Console. When Google finds new data in GWC, chances are your de-indexed list will be re-indexed again.
There may be more ideas, but I can quickly think of the above-mentioned few if you are choosing an external link as an idea.
