In the latest edition of Google’s SEO Office Hours, analyst Gary Illyes addressed a website owner’s concern that his website was disappearing from search results for a particular keyword.

Despite the previous first ranking, the website owner could no longer find his website, although the page was still indexed.

Illyes assured them that it’s unusual for a website to lose its ranking for a keyword.

In most cases, he said, competitors have outperformed the site.

“It’s really uncommon that you completely lose rankings for just one keyword. Usually instead, when you actually vanished for that one particular keyword, you’ll just be outperformed by someone else in search results.”

Here are more insights from Illyes investigating ranking drop.

Investigating keyword ranking issues

To determine if the drop in rankings was an isolated incident or part of a broader trend, Illyes suggests checking if the issue is global.

To do this, he recommends asking friends who live elsewhere to search for the keyword and see if they can find your site.

Search results may be influenced by a user’s location and search history.

If a website’s disappearance for a given keyword is limited to a specific region or individual users, it may be due to geo-targeting or personalization factors.

Illyes explains:

“First of all, I would check whether this is the case worldwide. Ask some distant friends to search for that keyword and get in touch. If they see your website, it’s just a “mistake in the matrix”.

You can achieve the same yourself by using a virtual private network (VPN) to change your location and simulate searches from different countries.

This allows you to see if your site’s ranking is consistent across different locations.

If your site is consistently missing from test searches, you may have a more serious problem.

Illyes continues:

“Unless [find your website in search results]then I would next go through my past actions to see if I did anything that might have caused it.

Changing my internal link structure, page layout, purchasing additional links, using the disavow tool, etc. can all impact ranking. So going through them will probably help.”

In addition to Illyes’ advice, there are other reasons why a website can disappear from search results for a particular keyword.

Some of the possible causes are the following:

• Increased competition: Your competitors may have improved their content or implemented better SEO strategies, causing them to outperform your website for the target keyword.
• Technical problems: Crawling or indexing issues can cause your site to disappear from search results. This could be due to problems with your robots.txt file, sitemap, site structure, or issues like broken links, duplicate content, or slow page load times.
• Link profile changes: A sudden loss or gain of backlinks can hurt your site’s ranking. This can be due to links from low-quality or spam websites, manual action by Google, or loss of high-quality links.

In total

It’s rare for a website to disappear from Google’s search results for a search term.

When that happens, Illyes thinks it might be an error, and you can verify this by looking up the keyword in various places.

If you determine that the drop in rank is not a bug, investigate other issues.

For more insight from the Google Search Relations team, watch the full episode (this discussion starts at 10:24).

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