Do rankings return to previous rank after a site has been un-indexed?

[Alex_Ratynski]

My client has had a site since 1996 (the first one was a www subdomain, his current site has no www). He came to my company for SEO about a year ago, after having a WordPress site that was accidentally set to not be crawled/indexed by search engines.

We set the site to be indexed and added a blog. Since then, he has had slow increase in keyword rankings (on page 3 or most globally searched terms) but is still nowhere near page 1 for most of his keywords. He thinks my company has done nothing, while I see the keyword improvements as a sign of success - slow, gradual - but going in the right direction.

I don't know if he was ranking well before he had a site that was not set to be indexed - but if he was on page one, would he eventually return there? Or do we have to build everything over again?

[generalzod]

Unfortunately not. If he blocked crawlers from his site for long enough, they would eventually give up and treat the site as though it was gone from the Internet. If he doesn't rank now, he will effectively be starting from scratch.

Indeed you are doing fine if you are getting improvements in search engine results. Whether he will return to page 1 or not depends on many factors, such as how much his websites has changed, how many links have been built during that period, what other websites have done during that time and any Google updates that might have affected his linkbuilding.

I wish you the best of success - but you will need to be honest with him and tell him the damage he did by blocking search engine crawlers. Doing THAT was 100% not your fault.

[Alex_Ratynski]

Thank you, Dan! We have indeed been very transparent about the repercussions of not being indexed. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.