As I was working on LinkedIn campaigns for a client today, I noticed LinkedIn was not appearing on Google. Surely not! But my suspicions appear to be correct, and they appear to have been temporarily deindexed. And  of even more interest is that it was possibly LinkedIn’s own fault.

Why? Simply for not following SEO best practices. LinkedIn developers performed a significant SEO fail today.

Robots.txt files allow websites to block search crawlers including Google, which can remove a site from search results. Obviously, it is vital for optimal search engine optimisation not to block Google. Perhaps, LinkedIn made an error. It appears so, as their Robots.txt file was quickly updated later in the day and they were quickly reindexed.