A page disappeared from Google - how do I find out why?

A page that fell from position 3 to position 29 produces the same panic and needs a completely different response, so this step is not a formality. Google's own checklist starts in the same place (Why is my page missing from Google Search?).

• Turn SafeSearch off. Google lists this first, because a filtered result set looks identical to a missing page.
• Search site:url_of_page for the single URL, and site:your_domain_name for the whole site. If the site returns results and the page does not, you have a page problem rather than a site problem, which halves the list below.
• Run URL Inspection on the URL in Search Console, then Test Live URL. The live test is what tells you the current state; the cached verdict tells you the state at the last crawl, and in an incident those are different answers.
• Open the Performance report and filter to that URL. Impressions that fell to zero on a date are a disappearance. Impressions that held while clicks fell are a ranking change, and nothing on this page applies.

Google publishes a taxonomy of traffic drops by the shape of the chart, which is the fastest way to classify what you are looking at before touching anything (Debugging drops in Google Search traffic).

Each of these takes one command to rule out, and the order is by how often it is the answer. Run all four before forming a theory.

Then it is one of the causes Google lists that are not about your markup. The first two are deliberate decisions by Google and each has its own report in Search Console; the rest are ordinary and uninteresting, which is why they get overlooked.

• A manual action. Check the Manual actions report. Google: "If your site doesn't comply with the Spam policies for Google web search, your content might rank lower in results or not appear in results at all."
• A security issue. Check the Security issues report. Google warns users before they reach a flagged site, which collapses traffic without removing the page.
• The page is new. Google notes it can take weeks before a new page is crawled, and a page that was never indexed has not disappeared.
• Duplicate consolidation. Where several URLs serve the same content, only the canonical version appears, whether or not you chose it.
• Findability. A page nothing links to is one Google may simply not reach, which is also why a page falling out of the XML sitemap matters more on a large site than on a small one.
• A crawler-only block. If the page loads for you and 403s for Googlebot, nothing in your HTML will show it. That is an edge rule, and URL Inspection's live test is the quickest way to see it.

• Fix the cause first. Requesting indexing on a page that still carries a noindex achieves nothing except a queue position.
• Then request indexing through URL Inspection for the handful of URLs that matter. For a site-wide fix, do not request thousands; Google will re-crawl on its own and the tool is rate-limited by design.
• Expect recovery to take as long as a re-crawl takes, which is days for a frequently-crawled page and weeks for one Google visits monthly. Rankings settle more slowly than indexing does.
• Write down the date the cause shipped. The gap between that date and the date you noticed is the only number in this incident you can actually improve.

Every cause in the first table is a one-line change that a browser cannot see. The page renders, the links work, the analytics tag fires, and the deploy is green. Search Console reports all of it eventually, with the Page indexing report lagging a few days and being a habit nobody keeps daily.

So the usual shape of this incident is not a hard problem badly diagnosed. It is a trivial problem found late, and the cost is the number of days in between multiplied by whatever the page was worth. That gap is the thing worth engineering away, and it is the one part of the problem a report cannot fix.

CrawlWarden watches a list of URLs you choose and reports what changed. It does not diagnose and it does not score. Severity is a property of the check rather than a setting: the number below is how many consecutive runs must see the new value before it becomes an email, and it is never less than two, because one observation is noise.

Every check is available on every plan, including the free one. CrawlWarden pricing, per site rather than per URL.

• the noindex tag, which is the most common single cause
• the coverage state Google gives when nothing is blocking the page
• a fall in clicks with no visible change on the site
• a page that answers 200 while reading as missing
• a block that applies to Googlebot and not to you
• every failure mode CrawlWarden watches for
• every check it runs, and what a change in it means

What was checked, and where. An entry with no link is something that could not be verified, named here rather than left out.