Webmaster Help Center

When a webmaster tells us that his or her site has fallen out of our search results, we often find that it's still included. To quickly determine whether your site is still in our index, just perform a Google site search for its entire URL. A search for [ site:www.google.com ], for instance, returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:www.google.com

If your site is displayed as a result when you perform a Google site search for your URL, then it's included in our index.

While we're always working to include more content in Google, sites can occasionally fall out of our search results. Our spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild our index, but keeping tabs on billions of pages is tough work, and we may miss a few. Due to the addition of new sites and updates to the content or scoring of existing pages, some pages may no longer be returned for particular queries. When this happens, the site is usually still in our index but simply outranked by other sites for that particular query, most commonly due to changes in our ranking algorithms. Our aim is to return highly relevant results for every query we receive.

Occasionally, fluctuation in search results is the result of differences in our data centers. When you perform a Google search, your query is sent to a Google data center in order to retrieve search results. There are numerous data centers, and many factors (such as geographic location and search traffic) determine where a query is sent. Because not all of our data centers are updated simultaneously, it's possible to see slightly different search results depending on which data center handles your query.

We understand that these changes can be confusing. If your site is well-linked from others on the web, it's likely that we'll add it again during our next crawl. While we can't guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our index or appear with a particular rank, our Webmaster Guidelines offer helpful tips for maintaining a crawler-friendly site. Following these recommendations should increase the likelihood that your site will show up consistently in our search results.