Yesterday was a fun day in the SEO space, at the expense of LinkedIn. LinkedIn's www.linkedin.com pages dropped out of the Google search results for about 10 hours. But when it came back, it all came back really quickly. The SEO community is asking how did Google reprocess everything so quickly and how did LinkedIn return in Google search so quickly.
The easiest way to explain it was that IF (we do not know what LinkedIn did for sure) LinkedIn went into Google Search Console and accidentally requested a removal of the www domain in Google Search, then that doesn't technically remove the pages from Google's index. All it does is flag those pages as to be hidden from showing in the Google Search results. So when you remove the flag to remove these pages, since those pages have never technically been removed from the index, they will pop back in pretty quickly for a search on LinkedIn in Google.
If the pages were really de-indexed, Google would have to reprocess those pages and it would have taken a longer time.
Gary Illyes from Google explained it this way "Not shown in SERPs: click a button, site's back." But "Deindexed: wait until all pages are crawled again, selected to index, and then propagated to serving clusters."
Here is his tweets:
Not shown in SERPs: click a button, site's back.
— Socially distant Gary Illyes (@methode) May 6, 2020
Deindexed: wait until all pages are crawled again, selected to index, and then propagated to serving clusters.
Again, no one knows exactly what LinkedIn outside of someone at LinkedIn and Google. But no one has said what LinkedIn did officially nor did anyone tell me anything off the record. So this is just my best guess.
He validated my explanation as well:
The explanation's spot on. The guess about what they did or not is not my place to confirm or deny.
— Socially distant Gary Illyes (@methode) May 6, 2020
John Mueller from Google explained it this way:
No. There's no need to force a version out of the index, it'll happen on its own as it's reprocessed (and as canonicalization happens). Using the removals tool doesn't change indexing, it only changes if it's shown in the results. The best solution is patience :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 6, 2020
This tweet from Danny kind of validated it was not a Google issue:
We're aware that pages from the main LinkedIn site might not be showing in Search right now. We're not aware that there is anything on our end causing this.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 6, 2020
In any event - LinkedIn is back and this was all a good learning experience for the SEO industry.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
