Overcoming Being De-Indexed by Google

August 29, 2008 by · Leave a Comment 

I get this question alot, especially from new webmasters venturing into the unknown. In fact I just recently had a very good friend of mine fall victim to having his well established website become de-indexed! So we began backtracking and trying to figure out where he went wrong. You want to know what his problem was? His webhosting company! His site was down way too often for his own good and he eventually got the index boot because of it. Here are some of the things that we checked out before coming to that conclusion.

  1. Robots.txt – It’s important to verify the contents of your Robots.txt, especially if you have recently made any changes. Webcrawlers pull up the robots.txt file before crawling your site to understand how you want it indexed. Make sure that you don’t have any code to block the website from being indexed.
  2. .htaccess – This is another good place to start. If you happened to recently change your contents of your htaccess make sure that you didn’t mess anything up that could cause you getting de-indexed.
  3. Downtime – As stated above this was the reason that my friends website was de-indexed. His host was unreliable (yet cheap), but whats the point of cheap if you have alot of downtime and eventually get your website de-indexed? Pony up the difference for a quality host.
  4. No New Content – Although extreme this can happen if you do not update your website. Make sure that you update things atleast monthly and keep your website fresh!

Did Google de-index your site? Wanna get re-indexed and establish what caused the problem? Great here is what you need to do.

  • Register Site With Google Webmaster Tools – If you haven’t done this yet then you absolutely need to check out Google’s Webmaster Tools. It really gives you the 411 on what is going on with your website, why Google likes or dislikes it, and how you can improve it. Once within the Google webmaster tools its time to begin playing around and getting used to its back office. This is a very nice tool to gauge your websites health and if its ‘clean’ in Google’s eyes.
  • Build Backlink Infrastructure – If for some reason you don’t have a nice backlink structure its time to begin building one. Don’t go overboard or you can find yourself BANNED if the process doesn’t look natural. So make sure to keep things natural and create some beautiful backlinks. Check out my 30 Day Guide or Backlink Ideas sections for hundreds of quality backlink building ideas.

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