Lessons to learn from Google de-indexing
Search Engine Land was recently delisted from the Google search results.
Barry Schwartz has shared the lessons the Search Engine Land team learnt when their site was mistakenly deleted.
Schwartz says, “The irony of a website dedicated to covering search engine marketing getting accidentally delisted by Google was not lost on us (or the community). Following are more details on what happened, how Google responded to our follow-up questions, and most importantly what SEOs, webmasters can learn from our dramatic day.
What we’ve learned so far
In total, Google did not include Search Engine Land in the results for more than 12 hours on Nov. 30.
What happened? We’re told the site was completely removed (rather than given a warning) because Google’s hacking classifiers had some sort of bug and classified our site as being hacked when it was not. “This was a mistake in our systems — a false positive that indicated that the site had been hacked,” a Google spokesperson said.
Why no warning before removal? One of the biggest questions we received from the SEO community was why didn’t Google just label the site as being hacked in the search results? Why did Google take the severe step of removing the site completely from the index?”.
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