Why Sites and PBN Blogs Get Deindexed, and How to Recover

At a glance

• Deindexation means Google has removed a page or a whole site from its index, which is different from dropping in the rankings.
• Check with a site:yourdomain.com search first, then rule out a noindex tag, an X-Robots-Tag header, robots.txt or a Search Console removal you set yourself.
• In our 2015 analysis of deindexed blogs on Easy Blog Networks, most had redirected large numbers of old 404 pages to the homepage.
• Other causes we’ve seen on our platform: content in an unrelated subject or another language, over-blocking crawlers, broken blogs, thin blogs and footprints.
• A deindexed blog can sometimes be saved by rebuilding its old URLs with relevant content, but a toxic domain is usually better deleted.

Most deindexations we see are self-inflicted: a setting someone forgot, a redirect plugin, a broken theme, a footprint. This article goes diagnosis first: confirm it, rule out your own settings, then look at causes, using what we’ve seen on the Easy Blog Networks platform since 2014.

First, confirm it’s deindexation

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes back, the domain is out of the index. If some pages come back, check the missing ones individually with site:yourdomain.com/page-url.

For a money site, use Google Search Console. The Pages report shows which URLs are indexed and why others aren’t, and the Manual actions report shows whether a reviewer has taken action against the site.

For a PBN blog, don’t add Search Console. Our PBN guide’s advice is to keep Search Console, analytics and ad codes off network blogs, because each one ties the blog to your account. Use the site: search instead. On Easy Blog Networks, the dashboard shows each blog’s indexation status.

Rule out self-inflicted deindexing

Before looking for a penalty, check that you didn’t tell Google to drop the pages yourself.

• A noindex meta tag. View the page source and search for noindex. In WordPress, check Settings → Reading for “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, and check your SEO plugin’s per-page settings.
• An X-Robots-Tag header. Google’s documentation says that instead of a meta tag, a server can return “an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header with a value of either noindex or none” (Google Search Central, fetched 2026-10-28). It doesn’t show in the page source. To check it, open your browser’s developer tools, go to the Network tab, reload the page and look at the response headers. Or run curl -I https://yourdomain.com/ in a terminal and look for an X-Robots-Tag line.
• robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow rules that cover the missing pages. A blocked page can’t be crawled. Google also notes that if robots.txt blocks a page, “the crawler will never see the noindex rule,” so mixing the two causes confusion.
• Removals in Search Console. If someone with access used the Removals tool, the URLs are hidden from results for a time.

If none of these apply, the cause is somewhere else.

What our platform data showed

Hosting many PBN blogs lets us look for patterns across deindexations. These findings are historical, and we’ve kept only what still holds up.

July 2015: mass redirects of 404s to the homepage

In a 2015 deindexation sweep, some users lost more than a few blogs at once. It was a minority of users and blogs on the platform, and no user or server lost a large share. We analyzed every deindexed blog and found one clear pattern: the large majority were redirecting 404 errors, and they had a lot of them, because the old site had many subpages.

In our July 2015 analysis of deindexed blogs on EBN:

• 80% of deindexed blogs had 30% or more of all their traffic redirected to the homepage.
• 90% of blogs that stayed indexed had less than 5% of their traffic redirected to the homepage.

Redirects to a new URL with the same or similar content are normal, and sites do it all the time when they redesign or move pages. Redirecting tens or hundreds of old subpages to the homepage has few legitimate uses. The plugin isn’t the issue. The redirect pattern is, so swapping plugins or doing it in .htaccess doesn’t help.

The same analysis found that blogs with more posts (10 or more) and more pages (5 or more) were less likely to be deindexed.

What we recommend:

• Disable 404-redirect plugins on blogs whose old site had many subpages.
• Rebuild the strongest old subpages at their original URLs, with similar content.
• Use a custom 404 page with a link to the homepage for the rest.
• Add more posts and pages.

August 2016: what crawl data showed

We save what we know about every blog that gets deindexed and analyze them in batches. In a 2016 batch we found:

• Old URLs keep getting crawled. On a domain with history, Google kept requesting old URLs for months, even when they returned 404 errors.
• Unrelated content or a different language can cause deindexation. Rebuilding an old domain with content on an unrelated subject, or in another language, was linked to deindexation.
• Over-blocking crawlers can cause deindexation. Users who stacked several crawler-blocking plugins and blocked extra crawlers ran into trouble. Block as few crawlers as possible.
• Some domains appear permanently penalized. They got no crawler traffic at all, so they never got indexed. We couldn’t tell how long that lasts or what caused it.
• Crawling continues for a few days after deindexation. Google kept visiting old URLs for about 5 to 7 days after a domain dropped out of results. That window may give you a chance to save the blog (see recovery below).

Ongoing: broken and plain blogs

Two more causes come up again and again. Blogs that don’t load, usually because of a broken theme or a misconfigured plugin, get dropped. And in our experience the blogs that get deindexed tend to be plain blocks of text with no images, a handful of posts and nothing a reader would come back for.

The footprints that get networks deindexed

Beyond single-blog issues, whole networks get deindexed when something ties the blogs together. The ones we see most often:

• Outbound link patterns. All blogs link to all your money sites and to nothing else. Our guide lists this, with shared WHOIS owners, as the two obvious footprints most likely used in the mass PBN deindexation at the end of 2014.
• Analytics, Search Console and ad codes. A unique ID on every blog connects them to one account.
• Old-style SEO hosting. Different IPs on the host’s own servers with custom nameservers that only that host uses. See nameserver footprints.
• The same unusual plugins or custom theme on every blog.

The full classification, including which footprints are harmless, is in PBN footprints.

Why money sites get deindexed

A money site usually drops out for different reasons than a network blog.

Google’s spam policies say violating sites “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all,” and that Google detects violations “both through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action” (Google Search Central, fetched 2026-10-28). Per Google’s Search Console help, a manual action is issued “when a human reviewer at Google has determined” that a site’s pages don’t comply with those policies, and the owner is notified “in the Manual actions report and in the Search Console message center” (support.google.com, fetched 2026-10-28). The action types listed there include “Unnatural links to your site”, “Thin content with little or no added value”, “Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects” and “Major spam problems.”

Hacked sites are handled separately, in Search Console’s Security Issues report. A hacked money site can lose pages or be flagged until it’s cleaned.

Can you get reindexed? Recovery steps

For a money site, check the Manual actions and Security Issues reports. Fix every issue on every affected page, then use Request Review in the Manual actions report.

For a PBN blog:

1. Rule out self-inflicted causes (the section above) and confirm the blog loads.
2. Remove 404-to-homepage redirects.
3. Act fast. Because crawling continues for a few days after deindexation, rebuilding the old URLs with relevant content, in the domain’s original language, may help.
4. Add more posts and pages so the blog looks like a real site.
5. Check the blog for the footprints above and fix any you find.

Be realistic about some domains. Some appear permanently penalized and never get crawled again. Our PBN guide’s view on a domain that fails testing applies here too: if it’s toxic, there’s not much you can do but delete it and replace it. Vetting the next domain’s history first helps. See how to choose an expired domain.

Prevention checklist

Merged from our deindexation posts, keeping only what still applies:

Area	Do this
Domains	Vet each domain’s history and backlinks before buying. Check it against spam and malware blocklists. Use common registrars and don’t buy all domains on the same day or from one marketplace.
Hosting	Use reputable providers, with IPs and nameservers shared with legitimate sites. Avoid old-style SEO hosting with custom nameservers.
Setup	Make sure every blog loads. Use common plugins and themes, and vary them across blogs. Don’t use plugins that try to hide WordPress.
Redirects	Don’t redirect old 404s to the homepage. Rebuild strong old pages instead.
Content	Write on the domain’s original subject and in its original language. Use images and formatting, vary article length, and don’t write only about commercial keywords. Add About, privacy and other internal pages.
Posting	Our recommendation: about 5 posts in the first week, then weekly, and monthly once a blog has 20 or more posts. This is our habit, not a threshold Google uses.
Linking	Don’t link to all money sites from all blogs. Link to other small niche sites and some authority sites. Mostly use brand anchors, link internally and let links drop off the front page.
Tracking	No Search Console, Analytics, AdSense or other unique codes on network blogs.
Crawlers	Block as few crawlers as possible.
Monitoring	Check indexation regularly so you catch a drop in the first few days.

For the build steps behind most of this, see how to build a PBN. For the bigger risk picture, see are PBNs safe.

How Easy Blog Networks helps

Several of the causes above are hosting and maintenance problems. On Easy Blog Networks:

• The dashboard shows indexation status and Majestic metrics for every blog, without Search Console on the blogs.
• Each blog’s IP and nameservers come from the hosting provider itself, shared with that provider’s other customers.
• Maintenance runs on autopilot: automatic WordPress, theme and plugin updates, which matter because an out-of-date WordPress is the single most common cause of successful hacking attempts, and daily backups.

Content, linking and redirects are still up to you.

FAQ

How long does it take to get reindexed?

There’s no fixed time. Once the cause is fixed, the page has to be crawled again. For a manual action, Google says “most reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks” (fetched 2026-10-28).

Can a whole site be deindexed for one bad page?

Not necessarily. Google’s help page says a manual action “can be a subset of your site, or the entire site,” and the report shows which pages are affected (fetched 2026-10-28).

Does a deindexed PBN blog hurt my money site?

Its links stop counting. On its own that is a lost link, not a penalty. If many blogs linking to you are caught as a network, check your money site’s Manual actions report.