What We Learned from LinkedIn's Google Indexing Issue

If you're not aware of it, someone from LinkedIn apparently used the Google Removal Tool incorrectly, and millions of pages, especially LinkedIn profile pages, were de-indexed in Google's search engine result pages. I reported this on my blog LinkedIn's pages removed from Google's Index.

As a result of that, their entire www subdomain was removed from Google's search results. All 233,000,000 pages. Many were ranking, so it was most likely a massive loss of traffic for them.

John Mueller tweeted about this, but didn't mention LinkedIn in particular:

Later in the day, LinkedIn's pages came back into the index just as quickly as they had vanished.

Ultimately, here's what I learned from today's LinkedIn fiasco:

• It's possible to screw things up when using the Google removal tool in Google Search console, especially if you're using parameters and not removing one URL at a time.
• Google will remove the pages quickly if you use the Google Removal Tool. And in this case they removed millions of URLs. That can be a good thing (or a bad thing!)
• The Google removal tool is just a "mask" and the pages aren't really moved from Google's index. Technically speaking, the URLs are still in Google's index, they're just "hidden" and won't show up at the time of the search.

Because the pages are still in the Google index but hidden from the search results, the pages can be restored quickly, as in the case of the LinkedIn pages. The pages on the www subdomain were back in the index a few hours later, all 233,000,000 of them.