Two high ranking pages instantly dropped from index - no manual penalty notification

Vuly

We are facing an issue where two of our major rankings pages have just completely disappeared from search results.

This has happened in the last 24 - 48 hours and there has been no changes made to the site. From what we can tell, it's only impacted two pages (but two very important category pages).

I have double and triple checked all standard indexing protocols - Search Console URL inspection says the pages are fine to crawl and index. URLs have been requested to re-index but nothing has worked.

This would have me to believe it could be a manual action yet there are no notifications in Search Console and we are listed as 'No issues detected' in all versions of our web property.

Can anyone else think what could be the reason?

EGOL

Here are some of the many things that can cause a page to disappear from the SERPs.

** Another webmaster grabbed your page and published it on his domain and now he is ranking for your keywords instead of you.

** You grabbed another webmaster's page and published it on your site and now that page on your site has disappeared from the SERPs.

** You have built or received links on other websites with anchor text that matches the keywords that you are no longer ranking for. (a page falling from the SERPs for this usually has a number of exact match keyword links)

** Your page has text or an image or other intellectual property on it that belongs to another person and they filed DMCA to Google. Now your page is not ranking.

** Another person has filed a false DMCA to Google that accuses you of taking their content.

** You have accidentally placed a no index for this page on your website.

** A hacker has placed a no index for this page on your website.

** These pages are relatively new and are in-and-out of the SERPs like many new pages do.

** You have done (intentionally or innocently) some sin and now Google has whacked your page.

Usually one of the above will account for a page missing from the SERPs. There are other reasons... but the above usually nail it. Rarely, Google will temporarily lose track of a page (really rare but can happen).

Vuly

Thank you this information EGOL.

Do you know if you get notified if a DMCA is filed against you?

Still no notifications at all and no manual actions reported under any of our web properties.

EGOL

Yes, they will notify you.... but.... they must be able to find your contact information.

If they notify you, they will provide information about the infringing resource and they will let you know who complained.

Vuly

We have received no notifications for anything.

The URLs in question are -

https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/trampolines

https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/swingsets

It's impossible to know what the best course of action is. We don't know if they have been manually reviewed or if a error has occurred or what.

Worst timing for this to happen as well.

effectdigital

Those URLs don't index because they result in 301 redirects. Google only indexes the redirect destination URL, this is to cut down on people clicking SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) and then getting redirected (slow) instead of heading straight to the web-page

https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/swingsets (no hyphen) 301 redirects to https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/swing-sets (with a hyphen)

https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/trampolines (ends with "s", pluralised) 301 redirects to https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/trampoline (non-plural)

You can see Google has indexed the redirect destination URLs here

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Avulyplay.com%2Fen-AU%2Fswing-sets

and here

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Avulyplay.com/en-AU/trampoline