Google admitted in a video published on its own Search Central YouTube channel that if searchers do not use your page(s) in the search results, those pages may stop showing up in the search results. Martin Splitt said this in a recent YouTube short he posted where he said, "if pages fall off the index again... users don't really use them in search results."
In short, if Google ranks a page of yours in the search results and Google finds that searchers are not clicking on it or interacting with it, Google may not show that page in the search results in the future.
Here is the YouTube short where Martin Splitt from Google was talking about why "my pages are indexed but don't show up in the search results?" While he provided a number of reasons we all know, he also said:
If they are not showing up so it's either that the query is a bit weird or that the query hasn't actually been asked that much or that we have other pages that we think will help the user more than yours. So that's a performance problem that likely has to do something with around the content that you have on the pages. So you might want to check that out, especially if pages fall off the index again. That means that we thought they might be good but we found that users don't really use them in search results. So we thought like, yeah, okay, we gave it a chance but, ehh, you know others are doing better here.
Yep, Navboost being confirmed again by a Googler but this time not in some off-Google property deep inside a forum but on Google's very own managed YouTube channel.
Here is the full video - so you can watch it:
Here is the full transcript:
Hello and welcome to the office hours again. We got a question from someone who didn't leave us their name so it's a mystery question, but the question was pretty good so I thought I'd pick it anyway. The question goes.My site has been indexed and the pages have been added to the sitemap but they are still not appearing in search.
Well that can happen.
So for something to show up in search it has to go through a bunch of different stages. I'll try to link in the comments to the how search works to explain how that works in more detail. But fundamentally we need to know that the URL exists, that we call that Discovery. We need to actually visit the URL to see what's there. Then we might put it into a database we call the index. And then when someone looks for something that we think the page covers, we might show it in search results that's what people refer to as ranking, and we refer to it as serving as well.
So a sitemap helps with a first stage of Discovery. A sitemap tells us there is a URL that exists on this website. The fact that we have indexed it means we have discovered it. So your sitemap seems to be working. We crawled it because otherwise we can't really index it much, so we crawled it, we checked it out. There is caveats to that, we might actually index something without crawling but in this case we likely crawled it, we put it in the index so we think there's something there, good.
But then when someone asks a question, we look in the index for all the pages that we have that will probably be a good answer or good search result for that question, for the query. And then we're not picking your pages apparently.
If they are not showing up so it's either that the query is a bit weird or that the query hasn't actually been asked that much or that we have other pages that we think will help the user more than yours. So that's a performance problem that likely has to do something with around the content that you have on the pages. So you might want to check that out, especially if pages fall off the index again. That means that we thought they might be good but we found that users don't really use them in search results. So we thought like, yeah, okay, we gave it a chance but, ehh, you know others are doing better here.
So you want to have a look at your content because it's very likely that your content isn't really serving much in terms of queries coming in and that's why it's not showing up in search results.
I also converted the portion of this video where he said this into a GIF:
Forum discussion at YouTube.
