Webpage disappeared

[DChan]

I am not able to find my website ".com" nor another page "/home" when searching by site: I can find all the other pages of my website but these two pages have disappeared. I also just noticed that these two pages have disappeared from first page listing in the Google search results that they have always had first page rank. I can access both when using a direct link and when I use the "fetch as Google" feature in Search Console they render. Shouldn't these two pages be listed in the "site:" results?

Thanks for your help.

[keyplyr]

Indexing is a strategy all in its own. Sometimes pages drop out of the index then reappear in a few days, or even a week or two. Perhaps there was an issue at your server when Googlebot last requested those, now missing, pages.

Make sure your pages are not competing against themselves. Sometimes one page will drop from the index because another of your pages ranks better for the same content.

You could try fetching as Googlebot in the GSC and request reindexing of those 2 pages or even the entire site. If you use a sitemap.xml try resubmitting that as well.

But again, the pages will likely reappear on their own in a couple days.

[fix typo]

[edited by: keyplyr at 8:47 am (utc) on May 12, 2018]

[DChan]

Thank you. I just did the fetch and request reindexing. What worried me was I cannot find either of the pages in the "site:" search feature. That does mean that the those two pages have been dropped from indexing then?

[keyplyr]

Well not necessarily. Google's reporting tools can be buggy.

[DChan]

This is an old site, since 2003 and since then the .com page had been on first page search results until last year, the .com page disappeared. The /home.html remained in that search position since them until today, so it didn't really affect my traffic. Now it has also disappeared. The content on both pages do have similar content but not exactly. Meaning that the look of the pages are different, text is different but they both have many of the same links. Would that cause this? and if so, how do I fix this?

[keyplyr]

There are hundreds of reasons why pages loose ranking or get dropped from the index. There is no direct answer to your question, sorry.

But one factor could be that the index is now based on Mobile, so there's been some reshuffling.

[DChan]

It's back! I just searched with my main keyword and the page is in first place on the first page again! Maybe it was a bug as you suggested or the reindexing helped. Thank you so much!

[keyplyr]

Another mystery solved :)

[DChan]

I thought of that, the new Mobile indexing, and is probably causing a lot of problems for people. I had checked mobile search results and these two pages were not listed in the results there either, but are now back. Again, thank you for being here for when Google causes me to freak out! lol