LinkedIn, the leading business and employment-oriented online service platform, found itself deindexed from Google search on Wednesday, 6th of May 2020. This may or may not be due to an error or glitch from Google.
This news hit the headlines within hours, as many users noticed the LinkedIn was missing from Google.
If you tried to look up LinkedIn from early morning to mid-afternoon, roughly 10 hours, you’d find no results. Though, users could still visit the site by directly entering the URL in their browser. The site wasn’t down; Google simply deindexed it. This should give the wakeup call to all leading websites that you can also lose your presence on Google within no time.
How Did This Happen?
Well, many may have blamed Google for this. However, we have come up with two possible things that LinkedIn may have done for this to happen.
LinkedIn Disallowed Crawling Via Robots.txt?
According to a few experts who were trying to find the reason behind this, it was discovered that they disallowed crawling via Robots.txt.
Once you block Google crawling from Robots.txt, its pretty evident that you’ll get deindexed. And, if your website is one of the leading platforms, then seeing results instantly is pretty obvious as well.
LinkedIn Removed HTTP Version
It’s possible that LinkedIn got deindexed for removing the HTTP version of their site from Google. To support this theory, John Mueller also tweeted, stating the following. “Don’t use the removal tools for canonicalization.”
LinkedIn is Back!
To conclude, the good news is that LinkedIn got indexed again on Google. Whatever the reason may be, LinkedIn seems to have fixed it. This should be taken as a lesson for all website operators that Google doesn’t fix things on its own.
