Blog post not showing after it hit first page

[eric611]

Hello! 2 weeks ago I wrote a blog post and hit the 6th position for the keyword. Today I checked again and the post is not showing.

Entered the URL on GSC and it says the page is indexed. Also checked Yoast's settings for the post and it looks fine.

But even if I search the whole post title on Google, the page is not showing.

This seems very strange. Has anyone ever experienced this?

Update: if I enter the address on GSC and use the live testing tool, it says there are 2 errors (elements too close and content is wider than the screen.

However, the screenshot is bad. That's not how it actually looks on mobile and the problem is that the Menu is already opened (I could provide links to how a bad screenshot looks vs how it looks on an indexed page, but I don't think I'm allowed)

The posts with the errors have the same settings like the posts that have no errors.

How can I solve this? Already reached out to theme support and waiting for their response, but I'm curious if anyone has been through this

 

[Ryuzaki]

@eric611, The 2nd issue you've mentioned is a problem with the Mobile Responsivity Test. It's been going on for years. The tool will have an issue downloading and parsing the CSS & JS files which is why your site will look ugly in the rendered picture. Elements load to close together and all that because the CSS file isn't being used.

Google knows about this and hasn't made any effort to fix it as far as we can tell, but have assured us that their actual tool they use for the algorithm doesn't have the problem. Those errors will go away on their own.

Your first issue is one a lot of people are dealing with right now. Google is clearly making changes to what they want to and/or are willing to index (seems to be related to AI written content), and a lot of low-trust, low-age sites seem to be getting caught in the mix.

It's just as you said, that sites will have a few, half, or even all of their articles disappear from the top 100 rankings even though they're still indexed. You would expect this to be a penalty but it's so widespread it can't be more than a mistake.

Nobody knows what to do but wait, and a lot of people have reported that the problems were reversed on their sites and they came back. Some have not had that happen yet.

The best move is if you know you're not doing anything wrong like spamming and AI content, is to keep moving forward. Google will have to fix the problem eventually. I'd have expected it to be done by now, personally, but I'm also not extremely confident about their competency and hiring practices and internal concerns these days.

 

[eric611]

Just checked on my other site and it happens there too. This is a little disappointing, knowing that you can pour a lot of time and effort into an article and it won't rank because of something you can't control.

Anyway, thanks @Ryuzaki for your reply, I appreciate it and I hope this will be solved in the near future