Search Engine Land was mistakenly removed from the Google Index

Search Engine Land was misidentified by Google’s system as being hacked and was removed from Google’s search results early Friday morning. Google has resolved the issue and Search Engine Land should return to the Google index shortly.

What happened?

A Google spokesperson said “This was a case where our system misidentified the site as being hacked.”

Since it was very early in the morning, and I personally do not have access to Google Search Console for Search Engine Land, I was unable to find out the cause of the issue. In its response, Google told us, “[A] message informing the site owner that we believed the site was hacked would have been made available within Search Console, as well as an option to request a review. … However, as we discovered the error before a review request was made, we reversed the action,”

The normal process would be that someone with verified access to Google Search Console would see the hacked message and request a review. Then Google would return the site to Google’s index if there is not hack. In this case, Google spotted the misclassification before the review was requested and processed the reversal sooner.

The good news.

A Google spokesperson told us “the site should return to the index soon.” Our tech team on the west coast is going to wake up to a good story.

Why you should care?

This highlights why having access to Google Search Console is so important. Without that, in many cases, many would continue to speculate why the site was not indexed in Google. And they might spend countless hours trying to debug a technical SEO issue or off-page site issue that was not there. Now we know it was a Google error, where they misclassified the site with a hacking issue and Google reversed the classification.

Comments

Google Image Search updates guidelines, adding structured data, speed and more

Google updated the Google Image Publishing Guidelines document today, adding more details around structured data, page speed, title management and user experience details. The old documentation can be viewed in this screen shot I captured previously. The new guidelines have updated content around creating a better user experience with your images, including adding good context, optimizing placement, embedding tips, device-friendly sites and good URL structure for your images . In addition, Google has explained how the image titles work since the change. Google also added sections for adding structured data for product, video and recipe markup. There is a new section for speed, including information about their PageSpeeds Insights tool, AMP and responsive image techniques. You can check out the new guidelines over here and compare them to the old guidelines over here .

How to recover from a negative SEO attack

Welcome to the next-to-the-last article in our six-part series on negative SEO . If you’ve been following along, you understand what negative SEO is. You’ve audited your situation to know whether or not you were hit, and you know how to reduce your likelihood of being a target in the future. You even know how to try and defend yourself from an ongoing negative SEO campaign. Now, it is time to clean up the mess. This article is meant to serve as a companion piece to the previous articles in the series. As such, we will once again segment the recovery process into three main areas: links, content and user signals. The good news is that you can recover from attacks in any of those areas; the bad news is that, depending on what type of negative activity you’re attempting to recover from, it could be a lengthy process. Inbound links The first step is to build a disavow file of the most toxic links you have identified in your analysis of the attack. You can find more about how to structure ...

Google Search Console reporting currently delayed

Google posted on Twitter Friday morning that some of their reports within Google Search Console are currently delayed more than their normal two-days. “Some Search Console reports are currently a bit more delayed due to issues in the reporting pipeline,” the company said. This has no impact on your search rankings, this is just a reporting issue. Which reports are delayed? Specifically, the AMP, Rich Results / Structured Data, Hreflang, Index Coverage, and Mobile Usability reports are all delayed according to Google. I will say that I did check several of these reports, and not all of them are delayed. For example, while the mobile usability and AMP reports are both a week old, the index coverage report is only two days delayed, which is the normal expected reporting delay you would see in Google Search Console. Should I worry? No, this is just a reporting issue which Google said doesn’t affect your site in search. So your rankings should not be impacted by this issue. When ...

Grow Your Business throw Out of Digital Marketing

Search This Blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO),Social Media, Article Submission