If in the past few hours you have tried to search for the institutional website of your municipality on Google and you were unable to find it, know that you are not alone. As various reports on Reddit demonstrate, in fact, the disappearance of the institutional sites of many Italian municipalities from Google search results has afflicted several local administrations, raising doubts and concerns both in the latter and among indexing experts and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), i.e. those who optimize online content for work to make it more attractive to search engines. Some municipal portals, which have always been fundamental for access to services and public information in their territory, have been downgraded or even totally excluded from the search engine index, the so-called SERP (Search Engine Results Page), i.e. the page containing the search results, and without any apparent explanation.
Trying to monitor the status of these sites using special tools, such as Google Search Consolein fact, the message “Page is not indexed: Page crawled, but not currently indexed”, indicating that Google has actually analyzed the contents present on these sites, but decided not to make them visible in the search results. It is currently unclear why this happened.
What happened to the Italian municipalities that disappeared from Google: the possible causes
What makes the situation complex is precisely theabsence of a plausible reason given that the municipalities involved are not only those with sites created more recently but also some interested municipal portals that respect the most recent SEO guidelines and obtain positive evaluations on the so-called Core Web Vitalsthe main performance and usability indicators established by Google. This makes it unlikely that the anomaly is caused by structural or content quality problems but rather a problem related to the latest Google algorithm updates. Furthermore, a comparative analysis showed that on other search platforms, such as Bingthese same sites continue to get good visibility. It is therefore plausible that Google has introduced a change to the ranking algorithms which, for some reason, affected Italian institutional sites. Several local technicians suspect that the update implemented last August may be responsible for the incident and that the change was inadvertently applied to the municipal portals, penalizing their visibility.
To deal with this situation, local administrations reported the anomaly to Google via the feedback button and are actively monitoring their pages through Search Console. However, the lack of an official response is forcing many to seek temporary solutions or study alternatives. The issue is particularly delicate since these portals represent a primary channel of communication between public administrations and citizens. The institutions’ hope is that Google can quickly identify and resolve any algorithmic problem that is penalizing these sites, restoring their visibility and accessibility.
Which municipalities are affected by the SEO anomaly: the list
Although an exhaustive (and above all official) list of the Municipalities affected by the anomalyfrom the reports received and the tests carried out during the drafting of this article, the institutional sites of the following municipal administrations had the problem of non-indexing on Google:
- Bagno di Romagna (FC)
- Barzago (LC)
- Bellaria (RN)
- Bertinoro (FC)
- Brivio (LC)
- Carrara (MS)
- Casatenovo (LC)
- Castel Bolognese (RA)
- Brianza Castle (LC)
- Chignolo d’Isola (BG)
- Cisano Bergamasco (BG)
- Colle Brianza (LC)
- Collegno (TO)
- Forlimpopoli (FC)
- Galatina (LE)
- Imbersago (LC)
- Valletta Brianza (LC)
- Lomagna (LC)
- Massa Lombarda (RA)
- Medolago (BG)
- Saraceno Market (FC)
- Montiano (FC)
- Monticello Brianza (LC)
- Olgiate Molgora (LC)
- Osnago (LC)
- Paderno d’Adda (LC)
- Pennabilli (RN)
- San Leo (RN)
- Under Monte Giovanni XXIII (BG)
- Viareggio (LU)
How indexing works on Google
We take advantage of the phenomenon to briefly explain it to you how indexing works on Google. Basically, “Big G” is an automated search engine based on Web crawlersthat is, programs that constantly explore the Internet to find new pages and add them to their index. This process is divided into three main phases: scan, indexing And publication of the results. During the scan, the Googlebot – the Google bot also known as robot, bot or spider – identifies new pages through links, sitemaps and other reports, analyzing and making web content visible.
Subsequently, the scanned contents are indexed, that is, cataloged in the Google index, which includes the textual, visual and multimedia data of the pages. At this stage, Google tries to select the “canonical” version of a page among similar ones to avoid duplicates in search results, taking into account factors such as the content, structure and usability of the page itself. However, final visibility depends on hundreds of factors, including content quality, relevance, user experience, etc.
Not all pages detected by Google pass the entire indexing process and, consequently, not all pages appear in search results. This selection also depends on the “Robots meta tag” of the page and the quality of the content. In the case of Italian municipal portals, it seems that Google performed a complete scan of them, but for some reason opted not to publish many of these pages in the standard results, thus penalizing their visibility.
