LinkedIn is one of the most popular websites in the world. With over 690 million members, you can type a member’s name on Google, and the individual’s LinkedIn profile would probably appear in search results.
But even the most prominent websites on the internet can have issues with their SEO and Google, and LinkedIn is no exception.
At the early hours of Wednesday morning, the professional networking site temporarily dropped out of Google Search. None of LinkedIn’s hundreds of millions of web pages appeared if you did a site command for [www.linkedIn.com].
Instead, the search engine returned a “did not match any document” response.
As far as Google was concerned, LinkedIn did not exist on the web from early morning till mid-afternoon. That’s whopping six hours that could significantly impact the networking site’s traffic.
To be clear, the site wasn’t down. It was just temporarily de-indexed from Google.
So, what went wrong?
Neither LinkedIn or Google has issued an official statement on the strange occurrence. But, here are some possible explanations.
Possible Reasons Why LinkedIn was Temporarily De-indexed from Google
Several experts speculate that the issue is likely from LinkedIn’s end. If that’s the case, here are two possible reasons for the de-indexing.
LinkedIn Disallowed Crawling via Robots.txt
Reports suggest that the networking site used the robot.txt directive to block Google’s crawlers.
Using the robot directive to block Google’s bots is a sure way for the Search engine to de-index your site. However, the impact is rarely as immediate as it was in LinkedIn’s case.
According to Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker, the immediate exit from Google’s index may be due to a Search Console removal.
Here’s another possible reason.
LinkedIn Removed HTTP Version of Site
Yesterday morning, Google’s John Mueller tweeted that removing the HTTP version of a site can affect indexing.
He published the tweet in the morning, at around the period, LinkedIn dropped out of Search. Whether or not Mueller’s tweet was a coincidence, the explanation makes sense.
In an attempt to canonicalize the HTTPS version of its site, LinkedIn may have inadvertently removed itself from Google’s index using the Search Console.
As Mueller explicitly stated in his tweet, “don’t use the removal tools for canonicalization.”
Whatever the case may be, LinkedIn has long returned to Google Search. All we have now is a lesson that even the most prominent sites on the web make SEO mistakes sometimes.
Read More: “Google Isn’t Missing Sites” Using Quora for Link Building
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