1. I haven't changed anything, I promise.

Each time we update our database of webpages, our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and sites' rankings change. If your site was dropped from Google and you haven't made major changes to it, we'll likely pick it up again soon. It's possible your site was temporarily inaccessible when our robots tried to crawl it.

You might check to see if the number of other sites that link to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web, jumping from page to page via hyperlinks. To find a sampling of sites that link to yours, try a Google link search.

If you're suddenly having trouble finding your site for certain keywords, it's possible that your site is still included in our search results, but that its placement decreased for these keywords. Reshuffling of our search results can occur when new sites are found and assigned a higher rank. No one at Google hand adjusts the results to boost the ranking of a site. The order of Google's search results is automatically determined by many factors, including our PageRank algorithm, and is described in more detail here. To determine if your site is still included in our index, perform a Google site search for your domain. For example, if you own yourdomain.com, you'd do a Google search for [ site:yourdomain.com ] to see an estimate of how many of your pages we index.

2. There may have been a problem on my end.

If your pages were unavailable when we try to crawl them because of network or hosting problems, this may explain why they're not included in our current index. When a page is unavailable, we try crawling it multiple times, but if we can't reach it, it won't be listed in our index. If this unavailability was a transient problem, your site will likely show up soon.

Alternately, your page may have been manually removed from our index if it didn't conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We won't comment on the individual reasons a page was removed, and we don't offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. You may want to review our Quality Guidelines for more guidance. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try "cleaning up" the page and contacting us with a re-inclusion request. We don't make any guarantees about if or when we'll re-include your site.