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Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

> I am not familiar with any other instances of such partial delisting by Google. Are you?

I've been experiencing partial delisting on my own website over the last 3 months. Google Search Console [1] shows they now exclude 25% of my website from the index. Search Console lists those pages as "Crawled - currently not indexed".

Mine is also an old site (nearly 20 years old), but it already used CSS & XHTML, and I'd been updating it to HTML 5, mobile friendly & responsive design & implemented HTTPS. I hadn't been adding new pages / content, though.

When did your Google traffic start declining? My Google traffic started taking a hit around March 9, and there was apparently a "Core Algorithm Update" on March 7:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-confirms-core-update-253...

[1] https://search.google.com/search-console

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It has been a few years now that AntiPolygraph.org's Google ranking on the search term "polygraph" would vary between the first, second, and third page of results. We noticed the complete delisting on "polygraph" early this year. As observed in the United States and several other countries, a Google search on "polygraph" will return no results at all from AntiPolygraph.org, whether or the 1st page or the 30th.

Hmm, I tried from Australia, and your home page did show up on a search for "polygraph" on Google, but you're result #164. There were other sites opposed to polygraphs ahead of you - Polygraph.com was on page 7, while there was a YouTube video at the top of page 2, and some NY Times & Smithsonian Magazine articles about "how to beat a polygraph test" on Page 3 and Page 8 respectively.

Supposedly the March algorithm update was about query relevance [1], and maybe your site just isn't the most relevant for a very general search like "polygraph". My site used to be on page 2 for "Photoshop Plugins", but after the March update it crashed to page 5 (according to Search Console). Since my site isn't about every Photoshop plugin, just the ones I make myself, perhaps that's fair.

I'd definitely recommend playing with the new Google Search Console Beta - you can do a search on the specific "polygraph" keyword, and it will show you what your site's Google rankings were for that keyword over the last 16 months. Click on Performance in the left menu, set Date to Last 16 Months, then add +New -> Queries -> Query Is Exactly -> polygraph. My guess is you'll see a big drop on March 7 / 9. Also worth checking to see what your Click-Through-Rate is.

[1] https://www.mariehaynes.com/march-9-2018-google-algorithm-up...

Thank you for the time you took to research this question and for sharing your findings and thoughts on this! Yours is the most helpful reply I've received.

If I interpret things correctly, the Google Search Console Beta suggests that the situation is worse than I imagined. I have taken a screen shot that you can view here:

https://antipolygraph.org/graphics/google-search-console-ap-...

As you'll note, over the past 16 months, Google reports 147,000 impressions for the search word "polygraph," with an average position of 8.4, but only 381 total clicks. And the number of impressions and clicks flatlined somewhere around March. What do you make of this?

Yikes, it does appear Google stopped showing your page in most results for that keyword. (Hey, at least they've confirmed it!)

If you now click where it says Average Position, you'll get a purple chart of your average position/ranking for that specific keyword over time. (You can actually click on each of those boxes to turn the graphs on & off.) In my case, some of my keywords have a very obvious & sharp drop in ranking beginning around March 7 / 9. My guess is you'll see something similar.

If I'm right about the March Google update, then there isn't anything wrong with your site. It's just that people aren't clicking on your site when they search for "polygraph" (0.3% CTR is rather low, as you can see compared to your other keywords) or Google feels your page isn't the most relevant to their query. You could try making a page on your site focused specifically on that keyword, but you'd be fighting against Wikipedia & Merriam-Webster for the niche.

The same happened to me, right around the end of February/beginning of March. A website of mine which was consistently in the top 2 results for certain queries for the past 4+ years and is the most relevant result for that query abruptly disappeared entirely. It's got modern HTML/CSS, is responsive, and uses HTTPS. It has frequent activity (it's a community) and so is constantly updated.

Looking at the indexed pages, it seems to be stuck in some sort of strange limbo where half the time the homepage isn't even indexed, then it shows up again, then it's gone, back and forth endlessly for the past few months. It never appears in most Google results anymore unless I get very specific (like searching for the name of the website word for word).

I'm at a loss for what to try next. Traffic has dropped to 1/6th of what it was before.

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