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Gary Illyes from Google posted an awesome question and answer on Twitter talking about pages that are on the edge of the Google quality threshold. He said that if your pages disappear from Google Search and then reappear when you manually submit them to Google, that means you're on that edge.
Gary wrote on Twitter why does a page on my site keeps disappearing from search, but reappears when I submit to indexing in Google Search Console? Gary said the answer to this question is "the page is likely very close to, but still above the quality threshold below which Google doesn't index pages."
Here are those tweets:
as we fine new URLs, the page may fall out the index, but then you breathe new life into it temporarily by submitting to the index manually.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) July 28, 2021
FYI, I assume "fine" was a typo and should be "find" in the tweet above.
The page is literally living on the edge, the edge of that quality threshold.
I've talked about this threshold before, when it comes to algorithm updates and sites getting hit by an update and bouncing back after another update, without doing anything. But this is a different case of how a quality threshold impacts pages in Google Search.
In fact, John Mueller of Google recently said that if you need to submit pages to Google manually, it is likely a sign of a quality issue with those pages.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: A new post on this from John Mueller about being on the edge of indexing:
Yeah, that can happen. But it can also happen that it drops out again a week later, or a different URL drops out. If you're teetering on the edge of indexing, there's always fluctuation. It basically means you need to convince Google that it's worthwhile to index more.
— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 8, 2021
