LinkedIn disappeared from Google search results for about ten hours. (Photo: Sundry Photography / Shutterstock.com)
On Wednesday Linkedin.com briefly disappeared from the Google index and no longer appeared in the search results. The error may have been with LinkedIn itself.
For about ten hours, Linkedin.com disappeared from Google search results. A page query for www.linkedin.com brought no hits. Only results of country-specific domains could still be found.
Whoa – Google no longer has LinkedIn (www version) in its index https://t.co/FByZA80eny pic.twitter.com/v5AfqDabIr
– Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) May 6, 2020
The LinkedIn page was not down, but was directly accessible the whole time, but may have lost a lot of search traffic. The career network has now been fully indexed on Google again. But what is behind de-indexing?
Linkedin disappears from the Google index: what happened?
The exact reason for de-indexing Linkedin.com is unclear. However, shortly after the problem became known, Google employee John Mueller tweeted the note that removing an HTTP version of a page would remove all versions of this page. This means that site operators also remove the HTTPS variants and the versions with and without www. Mueller further pointed out that the URL removal tool in the Search Console should not be used to identify canonicals.
PSA: Removing the “http: //” version of your site will remove all variations (http / https / www / non-www). Don’t use the removal tools for canonicalization.https://t.co/yTfRzWZGtd
– ? John ? (@JohnMu) May 6, 2020
The URL removal tool is primarily used to temporarily hide certain URLs. If the HTTP version of a page is hidden, this also affects the HTTPS URLs and URLs with and without www. All these variants then no longer appear in the search results.
Another reason could be that LinkedIn blocked the crawling via robot.txt:
Pretty amazing that @LinkedIn has blocked themselves from Google.
Wonder if they also removed themselves via GSC to get this much of a clean break!
h / d @IanLurie pic.twitter.com/r02yH1qS5R
– lorenbaker (@lorenbaker) May 6, 2020
However, the effects are usually not visible as quickly as in the current case of LinkedIn. A manual action by Google against Linkedin is, however, unlikely. So far, neither Google nor Linkedin have commented on the cause of the deindexing.
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