Some sites vanished from Google, then came back a week later
Glenn Gabe confirmed the drops with both site owners and says the cause sits on Google's end.
Two websites in the same niche disappeared from Google search results completely last Sunday, then came back on Friday 10/16 at 8:15PM. Glenn Gabe reported it after speaking with both site owners, and he says the drops are confirmed, not a reporting error. The sites were gone even for brand queries, meaning searches for their own company name returned nothing.
Gabe says this is the second time he has seen it in about a month. He compares it to a September 4th unconfirmed update, which he also calls a possible glitch. Both sites sit in what he describes as an ultra-YMYL niche, short for Your Money or Your Life, the kind of topic like health or finance that Google treats with extra care. His guess is that some kind of security algorithm on Google's end went haywire. Nobody has confirmed that, and Google has not said anything about it.
Your rank tracker probably missed it
The part worth your attention is that the tools most site owners rely on did not show what actually happened. Gabe says Ahrefs saw a drop but on the wrong date, and never showed the recovery. Semrush showed the drop and a partial recovery, but with dates that were, in his words, way off. Sistrix showed the original September drop and nothing recent at all, even though the site went to zero and came back.
That matters because a tracker is often the first place a small business owner looks when traffic feels off. If the dates are wrong, you can end up blaming a change you made that week, or chasing a fix for a problem that was never yours. This is a running theme lately, alongside reports of ranking swings with no confirmed update.
Lily Ray, reacting to Gabe's post, asked whether Google is testing something. No one knows yet.
What to do
If your site vanishes from Google overnight, including for your own brand name, do not rush into big changes. Search your brand name in Google yourself to confirm what your tracker is telling you, note the exact date and time, and wait before rewriting pages or stripping content. In both cases Gabe documented, the sites returned on their own about a week later with nothing done to them.
The tracking tools are not picking up the entire picture btw.
They even dropped out for brand queries. Then both surged back from the dead on Friday 10/16 at 8:15PM to be exact.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.