HACKER Q&A
📣 throwaway25239

Google removed my site from search results, what can I do?


Hi HN,

I have a website for a piece of software I make, and Google search traffic accounts for a reasonably large portion of downloads. At the end of April, I moved the site to a new domain (using Google's "site move" tool), and everything appeared to be fine – Google indexed the new site within a few days, and traffic remained the same. However, in the past few weeks, I've noticed a drop in traffic to the site, and when I looked at the Search Console, I realized that all traffic from Google suddenly disappeared in the middle of June: https://i.imgur.com/S1CCl2f.png

Google has all the pages in the site indexed - when I search for "site:[my URL]", the pages show up as expected – but they seem to have been completely removed from any search results. If I search for the exact name of my app, where my site was previously the first result, the site appears nowhere in the 16 pages of results that are returned (I looked at all of them!). Similarly, if I copy a few sentences or an entire paragraph from the site and search for exact matches, Google will return irrelevant results or no results at all, and my site won't be included anywhere in the results.

At least from the search console, everything appears fine - there are no errors reported, and the "manual actions" and "security issues" sections are empty. The site content has barely changed in the last few months, so I can't see any reason for the change.

What can I do? There seems to be no way to contact an actual human, and since nothing on the site has changed, I can't think of anything to revert. I could try going back to my old domain, but I'm worried that would confuse Google even more, and I'm not sure that's even the source of the issue. Has anyone on HN ever faced this problem before?

  👤 hayksaakian Accepted Answer ✓
Do you still control the old domain?

Don't rely on the "site move" tool to talk to the crawler.

You need to 301 redirect your pages from the old domain to the new domain.

I see this all the time with clients who skip some basics when changing domains.

I'm happy to talk you through this via HN comments

👤 llarsson
I think it sees your new domain as just a blatant copy of the old one. Quickly set up a server on the old domain and redirect to the new domain, so you tell Google that the new one is the authoritative site.
👤 robinoh
> There seems to be no way to contact an actual human, and since nothing on the site has changed, I can't think of anything to revert.

There are some Google people on Twitter responding to concerns such as yours. @JohnMu is one of them. You can send a private message to him about it.

We've experienced similar issues, but possibly with a different cause, see https://seotool.ee/indexed-not-submitted-in-sitemap

Once Google doesn't like your site, it's not easy to get it back. It involves being patient and trying to understand what's wrong. Sometimes though, there is nothing to be done and your site just comes back up. Google is a big black box in this regard, and doesn't give any message in search console about what may be wrong.

👤 huy-nguyen
I’ve done this a few times. Even if you do 301 redirects properly, it still can take a month or two for google traffic to day get back to previous level. You might just have to be patient.
👤 rathish_g
I have tried this 'perfect switch over' for a major domain after many months of planning. Everything worked fine for a month and then the traffic dropped to 30%. The traffic went back to normal level after few months.

As usual there was no response from Google/ Forums etc. All I could speculate is the loss of backlinks. It takes months to reach the original level.

Keep improving the site and you should be back and kicking in 6 months.

👤 bluecmd
This doesn't help you now, but why didn't you keep the old site and just 301'd to the new page for a year or so?
👤 thrownaway954
Always... Always setup your site with Google search console and submit your sitemap to it.

You don't need to setup the old site on a server to 301 everything. You can just CNAME the old domain to the new one. And yes, you can do this with a GitHub.io domain, just have a .CNAME file in the repo. Then setup 301s on the new domain for the old paths to point to the new ones. The Redirections plugins for WordPress make this easy as hell if you are running WordPress.

hopefully this will help you out and get your new site index in no time

👤 throwmeaway5689
I've been through this multiple times in the last couple of years, it's worked well for me to move domain authority around in this manner. Maintaining a 301 redirect map on the original subdomain should work fine (probably better than meta headers on reinstated pages, I haven't heard of Google paying much attention to that) and you should be able to claw back your rankings. Running something like jekyll-redirect-from within your old github pages project looks like the ticket. Good luck!
👤 gscott
I have had something similar happen to me. It was resolved by getting more sites to link into mine. Getting new incoming linkes just immediately set things right.
👤 johnmarcus
I think for your software product, you may have underestimated the value of GitHub.io domain. Your post makde it sound like it went from one custom self owned domain to another, that's not the case at all. I would move it back to github.io, and build your other domain over time until they are 1&2 in results (or there abouts)
👤 saluki
I would definitely put up your old domain and leave the content the way it was, to try to get that back in the SERP.

Take your new domain and create new content there to try to build it up in the SERP over time.

Google seems to love aged domains.

I've always been hesitant to change domains.

I have changed the URLs on sites so going from services.html to /service with a 301 Google seems to keep the pages in the same place in the SERP.

I feel it's very risky to depend on Google for your traffic at this point. Definitely easier for it to disappear/drop, it doesn't feel like it used to be this way, it was pretty dependable if you had good content and were user friendly.

I miss Classic Google, I feel like SEO was more fair and even back then. You create a site, with good human content and Google rewards you.

Now I can search for a clients keywords and there is spam, malware and even 404 on the first page but no regular sites with good content.

Maybe Google or someone will bring back what was Classic Search someday and can get the majority of people using it again.

I literally loved Google, I have shirts and hats, dreamed of working there. I'm definitely heart broken over the way they have changed over the past few years.

RIP Classic Google.

👤 Can_Not
This might help if you can edit your html's meta tags on your old domain: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
👤 webbrahmin
Put up your old domain with content and then do a rel canonical from each page on the old domain to the corresponding page on new domain.

I faced same issue couple years back. Hope it helps.

Sorry if the same answer has been given before mine.

👤 ramiz1337
Sounds like you need an SEO audit - contact someone who understand technical SEO that can provide you an audit. It may be a small/simple issue causing your website to be de-indexed.
👤 hpen
How did you drive traffic to your site in the first place? I'm starting an online SaaS but having trouble getting my first users.
👤 franze
Give us more info: current domain, old domain
👤 slim
Buy google ads ? Put google ads in your site ? Google bots will certainly notice you if you do that
👤 quda
Don't use Google!
👤 kgraves
I'd rather go onto DuckDuckGo to drive SEO traffic.

Don't give money to Google, it isn't worth it since they are surveillance capitalists.

Boost your traffic through an ethical search engine instead.