If you are working in an industry which is highly competitive & dynamic, you must be on your toes to spot the change. Ranking a highly competitive keyword or website with massive search volume is laborious even for a seasoned SEO Professional.
As Marketers, we do everything under the sun to rank the client on page 1 of the Google and it’s really disturbing to find the website having been completely removed from the Google search listing page.
On April 05, 2019, a de-indexing bug hit Google search which resulted in deindexing of individual pages & subsequently affecting the ranking setting the SEO community into a frenzy.
Seo Companies started receiving anxious sometimes annoying calls from clients, trying to figure out why the sales dropped suddenly & the funny part is that they themselves were scratching their heads & than finally, Google acknowledged the cause.
Google came with another clarification on April 10, 2019, specifying that all the deindexing issues have been rectified & Webmasters have to sit back & relax.
Was that a case in reality? A big no, I would say, as the majority of sites were still not visible on search.
The Damage
Moz analyzed nearly 23237 stable URLs ranking on page 1 from Feb 28 to April 10. These sites remained unaffected during the March core update as well. What they found was nearly 4% of the URLs across all domains were impacted.
From the graph, a stable decrease can be seen in the rankings which is normal as a static search never existed in the first place but a sudden slump can be noticed on 5 March.
Here is the Zoomed version of the Graph
From this Graph, you can clearly see the 4% slump in the rankings on March 05, 2019 followed by a recovery than another drop of 4.4 %.
Although the data set analyzed by Moz is comparatively very little compared to trillions of webpages on Google but offers significant insights about the de-indexing bug
Should we worry about it?
When your important keywords have mysteriously disappeared from the Google search, isn’t that right time for SEO Guys to scratch their heads? But Google says there’s nothing to worry about as everything has been fixed & restored to normal.
Should we sit back & relax than?
Off course, if every URL of yours is ranking again & those annoying calls from clients have stopped but if you are not finding your URL on Google than you must try to index them individually.
In Google search Console, you can submit the URLs individually and then click on the request indexing button.
Sometimes a message is displayed by the search console specifying that the URL is already on the Google but still sometimes it is not displayed in the search result pages. You can ignore the message & request indexing & you are ready to go.
