by For a short time this week, the premier professional networking site, LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, temporarily dropped out of Google search…
Even the largest of digital properties can experience technical issues. That appears to be what happened earlier this week, when LinkedIn, the professional networking site, with more than 690 million users, temporarily vanished from Google search results. What’s odd is the fact that deindexing happened to not only such a large site, but one that’s owned by Microsoft.
LinkedIn Temporarily Disappears from Google Search
LinkedIn evaporated from Google search results on early Wednesday morning, apparently around 4:30 am. The problem persisted for quite some time, with the site not showing up on the Google SERP for several hours, only to begin resurfacing at approximately 1:45 pm in the afternoon.
Although there’s been no direct or official explanation from either LinkedIn or Google (or LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft), it seems the problem was the fault of the networking website, and not the search engine. However, John Mueller of Google did post a PSA on Twitter, explaining that removing the HTTP version of a site also causes all other variations to disappear:
PSA: Removing the “http://” version of your site will remove all variations (http/https/www/non-www). Don’t use the removal tools for canonicalization.https://t.co/yTfRzWZGtd
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 6, 2020
