Website disappeared from Google search

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math. We are sorry for any inconvenience this must have caused you.

We’ve checked the page, and it is appearing fine on the search results page. You may refer to the screenshot attached in the sensitive data section. Your robots.txt is working fine too but upon checking your sitemap, it redirects to the homepage. Please follow the steps below to fix it.

1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp

2. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server. For plugins or Cloudflare, please follow this article:
https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

3. Apply the following filter code to your site.

add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');

Here’s how you can add filter to your WordPress site:https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Back to the issue, please note that ranking on Google depends on so much more than just your on-page optimization. You could have the perfect article and still struggle to break the top 10 in SERPs. Here are some of the factors Google considers when ranking you:

1. Your website’s authority
2. Your content’s quality and how better it is than the other article currently ranking.
3. How competitive the keyword is.
4. How many backlinks do you have and if they are better than what the other guys ranking for that keyword have.
5. Your website’s crawlability.
6. Frequency of new content and content updates.
7. So much more that there is a dedicated blog post on it by Brian Dean:
https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

I would recommend that you keep at it and work on acquiring more links to break into the top SERPs.

Concerning your second issue, we’ve checked the page on Google with the site: operator and it looks like the page is currently not indexed on SERPS.

In this case, please test this page in the URL Inspection Tool and share the screenshot of the result with us so that we can check the issue further for you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en

You can use any image-sharing tool like https://imgur.com/upload to share the screenshot with us.

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.

Hello,

Yes, we checked on Google and we can confirm that this page is currently indexed on Google. Here’s a screenshot:

You can confirm if any page is on Google by using the site: operator, i.e. search on Google for site:domain.com/page, and the page should pop up if it is on Google’s index.

We hope this helps clarify the issue. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us again. We are always happy to assist you.

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

From your screenshot, you may click the request indexing button upon inspecting them.

However, the Discovered – currently not indexed indicates Google has discovered the page, and even wants to crawl the page. But this was expected to cause an overload on the site, hence Google has rescheduled the crawl.

As a result, Google may delay this crawl for several days after it has been discovered, and the crawl status would remain empty until then.

Here’s a link for more information:
https://rankmath.com/kb/discovered-currently-not-indexed/

Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

If there are pages with this status for a long time it is because Google is intentionally choosing not to index the page – and this could be for many reasons, most of which are listed here.

We also recommend that you check your Google Search Console for any errors or warnings that may affect your indexing. You can find more information on how to do that here

Unfortunately, we have limited control over Google’s indexing decisions, and sometimes they may choose not to index some pages even if they meet all the criteria. But if we see some examples of your URLs that are not being indexed we can offer some suggestions.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Hello,

Although being prominently listed on your website does help, it is not important to get indexed as long as the page is listed somewhere, anywhere on your website and on your sitemap. But please double-check to confirm that those pages are actually listed on your sitemap.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation