Identifying and Rectifying SEO De-Indexing Concerns, Part 2

In part one of this two-part blog series, we went over some of the steps toward identifying and addressing de-indexing issues on your site. This issue, often caused by a mistaken push of certain code onto your site, can create major rankings drops for keywords – but can also be remedied with the proper approach.

At SEO Werkz, our search engine optimization services include a variety of such solutions, plus the sort of expertise that stops them from happening to you in the first place. If these concerns are present, however, we’ll work diligently alongside you to remedy them quickly and return your site to its previous condition. Today, we’ll go over the steps toward recovering from a de-indexing issue, including how long this process may take.

Pushing Site

Once you have gone through the steps in part one to determine you have a de-indexing issue, the first step involved here will be removing the code that caused the problem. This will involve coordination with your developer, who can roll back any update and push the site live in the way it was before the no-index markup took place. This will at least stop the bleeding, so to speak, while you work on long-term recovery.

Re-Crawling

At this point, you will have to request re-indexing from Google for the pages that were impacted. This may involve deleting your old sitemap and making a new one, though our team will give you all the specific details required in your case. From here, you manually request re-indexing of all the pages that were affected by the initial concern.

Timetable to Recovery

From here, your next step may seem frustrating, but it’s just reality: You have to wait. Recovery from this sort of issue will not happen overnight, and how quickly it does happen – and how completely your rankings are able to rebound – may depend on a number of factors.

Within the initial few weeks after the issue took place, there’s a good chance you’re going to notice a drop in your search presence, and possibly a significant one. You can use Search Console to dig into exactly how badly your traffic is being impacted, and also to “validate” certain erroring pages and recrawl them. By the third week or so, you should start to notice pages re-indexing and a gradual increase in your traffic.

By about a month or so in, you should have had time to re-index all your pages. Within about six weeks, you should have recovered and perhaps even gained traffic if you did a good job with re-indexing – if all goes well, you will be able to fully recover at all URLs, driving similar search visibility to before.

For more on dealing with indexing issues on your site, or to learn about any of our SEO, PPC, web design or social media marketing services, speak to the staff at SEO Werkz today.