So Your Site Has Been Delisted By Google

I mentioned on Facebook that my site (https://www.jonathanmoeller.com) had been re-listed by Google after it had been de-indexed. Naturally, I used the opportunity to share a Star Wars prequel meme, but some people had substantive questions on what actually happened that were not answered by the prequel meme, so I thought I would answer them here.

Back at the start of August, I noticed a drop in my website traffic. At the time, I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Website traffic does fluctuate, and I was busy finishing COVERING FIRE and SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, which held most of my attention. But my website traffic dropped by about 25% and stayed there.

Finally, when I finished the rough draft of SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND, I had a chance to look into it further. I thought my web host was having problems, but what actually happened was that my site was removed from the Google search index. So if you searched for “jonathan moeller” in Google, you couldn’t find jonathanmoeller.com.

(Incidentally, you can check if a website has been indexed by Google by using the “site” argument in a search term followed by the site. For example, typing “site:jonathanmoeller.com” into Google will bring up every page that Google has indexed from jonathanmoeller.com.)

I have absolutely no idea why this happened. I keep my site and all the plugins up to date, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a security thing. I think what happened was that Google is really cracking down on non-SSL sites, and while I’ve been using SSL for years, I didn’t have http://www,jonathanmoeller.com automatically set to redirect to the SSL-enabled https://www.jonathanmoeller.com. It’s also possible my XML sitemaps weren’t formed properly. Or maybe it was just a glitch. I don’t really know.

While this was deeply annoying, it was by no means crippling. Traffic only dropped by 25%, and book sales were unaffected. Even if jonathanmoeller.com wasn’t showing up on Google, searching for “jonathan moeller” still brought up my Goodreads page and my Amazon author profile page. So there was still a pathway to my books through Google.

However, while not crippling, no one wants to live with deeply annoying problems. So I started digging into the research, and here’s what I did to get back on the Google search index:

-I registered my site with Google Search Console.

-Specifically, I updated my site’s DNS records following the Google Search Console guidelines, and uploaded the additional HTML files it recommended for site verification.

-I installed the XML Sitemaps plugin for my site to generate new sitemaps.

-I waited three and a half weeks after doing all that.

The site showed up on Google again sometime over the weekend of 9/10, and has stayed there since.

So, it’s good it’s back on the Google search index, but I don’t know why it disappeared. I can only assume that these guys are running Google’s search algorithms:

-JM