A Top SEO Agency Discusses Site Demotions And Site Deindexing

Ask any top SEO agency and they will tell you that there’s a significant difference between your website being demoted and it being de-indexed. If you suffer a site demotion, it means that your website has dropped in the search engine rankings. Being de-indexed is more serious: if that happens, it means your website isn’t showing up in the search engine rankings at all.

Nonetheless, as any SEO consultant will tell you, a drop in your position within the search engine rankings is extremely serious in itself. It means your visibility to customers and potential purchasers has been badly affected. It’s a commonly known fact that most people don’t look beyond the first couple of pages of results, so if you don’t appear there, you are significantly less likely to be seen. How do you know if you’ve been taken out of the search engine results entirely, in other words, de-indexed? Well, Google’s Search Console is the first place to look. The search engine will notify the web publishers through this forum, and then action can be taken, whether that’s by your SEO services agency or your own in-house team of SEO experts. There’s usually an easy fix if this has happened due to a technical issue, like a mistake in the code that has made the site no longer visible. The other main culprit behind being deindexed is often spam on your website – either your own content or comments on blogs, for instance. Spurious backlinks obtained using black-hat techniques could be another reason. But what if your site has been demoted and the answer isn’t immediately obvious? There could be a host of factors.

This is often where hiring a top SEO agency can help. They can use their experience to go through your website, step by step, to identify what’s wrong and how it can be resolved. Broadly, there are two areas. The first is that your products – or the keywords you use to describe them - may simply be no longer as popular as they used to be and people just aren’t searching for them in significant numbers any more. A crude example is if you sell plastic straws, something which has seen a drop in popularity as a result of concern about the effects of single-use plastics on the environment. If you’re sure that’s not the case, then it’s possible that something has changed in terms of quality on your site, or in how Google measures quality. Maybe your competitors have upped their game and produced content that’s more engaging and relevant than yours. Perhaps your content is stale and needs refreshing, or contains incorrect or out of date information. It could be that recent changes have made the site less easy to view on mobile devices, or the number of authoritative sites that used to link to yours has decreased. It can be hard to isolate and resolve the problem, which is where an SEO expert agency can assist.

There’s no reason to panic, but if you want to get your site back to where it was, or in an even better position, it is important to take action. Consult a top SEO agency with experience in dealing with issues like this