When Your Website Disappears From Google
A couple of weeks back, out of the blue, a client’s website vanished from the front page of Google’s organic search results.
Up until that point, my client had both his website and his Google Maps/Places listing appearing on the front page for his top keyword – and he was rapt. Then overnight disaster struck.
One fine morning, approaching Christmas, his website was gone, leaving only his Google Maps listing. His phones stopped ringing. Google Maps simply didn’t pull in customers like his website did.
Diagnosing The Problem.
Diagnosing why your website disappears from Google’s search results is a process of elimination.
If you haven’t misbehaved, you haven’t been penalised so disappearing from the front page is unlikely to be caused by penalty.
If you’re not completely sure, login to Google Webmaster and check the status of your website. If it’s clear, you’re ok.
If a competitor has upgraded their website, added new backlinks and content, I would expect to see my client potentially drop a place or two, not disappear altogether, so in this instance, you can rule out competitors.
If your website loads okay, and everything seems to be working okay, you probably haven’t been sabotaged either.
Through a process of elimination you can figure out that its a Google algorithm change. If you haven’t been caught out yet by an algorithm adjustment, you probably will in time. Google makes changes all the time.
Fixing The Problem.
The particular problem with my client was that his website and Google Maps listing shared a common keyword and a common domain address (URL) and Google has decided that you can only have one front page presence so it merged them together, and in this case, it chose Google Maps to display.
The fix is pretty easy. If you want your website to display instead of maps (as per my client), head into maps and alter your category to change the keyword. In other words, if your keyword on your website is “emergency plumber” and your maps listing category is “emergency plumber”, change it to something else.
It worked for my client.
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