Understanding and Correcting Website Reindexing Issues: A Guide for Beginners
Introduction
Renovating a website can be an exciting yet challenging process, especially when managing it independently without extensive experience. Recently, I was tasked with redesigning a local business’s website, which was previously managed entirely by a digital marketing agency. During this process, I encountered some setbacks related to search engine indexing, and I’d like to share my experience to help others facing similar situations.
Background
Before my involvement, the website’s domain and hosting were managed by a digital marketing firm. Once their services became too costly, the owner canceled the contract. Several months later, I was approached to rebuild the site. When I began the process, I observed that most of the website had become deindexed by Google. Interestingly, only the homepage URL and two other pages remained recognizable in search results, but without any ranking.
Initial Approach to Maintenance
To prevent potential negative SEO impacts during development, I created a simple maintenance page using HTML and embedded CSS. I then set up a server-side redirect utilizing the .htaccess file to route all traffic to this maintenance page with a 503 Service Unavailable status code. The goal was to signal to Google that the website was temporarily down for maintenance, allowing future reindexing once the site was ready. At the time, I focused on making sure the local business profile linked to the site rather than worrying about search rankings or full reindexing.
The Problem Emerges
However, I inadvertently left the 503 redirect active for an extended period. This resulted in Google deindexing not only the remaining pages but also the homepage itself. To mitigate this, I decided to temporarily disable the redirect, removing it from the server configuration, and renamed the maintenance page to index.html. By doing so, I aimed to have the homepage recognized as the main page of the site again and to reinitiate the indexing process.
Current Status and Observations
After modifying the setup, I checked Google Search Console (GSC) and noticed several issues and status messages:
- Four URLs were marked as “Excluded by tag noindex” — typically pages with a
noindexdirective or meta tag, which no longer exist. - Thirteen URLs returned 404 Not Found errors, including both old pages and the previous versions of the homepage (via http, https, www, and non-www URLs).
- One URL was identified as a “soft 404” — meaning Google perceived the