Page gets indexed by Google, then it's gone after 2 days, then back again after 1wk. Why?

Question

I've recently (2 months ago) launched a new website on WordPress with https. I submitted it in GWMT and it got indexed just fine.

Then I noticed that every time I publish a new post and submit it via Fetch as Google this happens:

the page gets indexed within hours (great) even images seem to show up in the search results a day later (even greater) 2-3 days later page is not in the search index anymore (not so great) it takes a week to see the page back in the index again Can someone explain what is going on? Am I doing something wrong? Is this normal behavior?

I also noticed something really weird when the page first disappears from the search results: if I'm logged in with my Google account and do a site: search, hitting refresh sometimes shows the page as indexed, sometimes not

thanks!

Answer 1

Hard to tell without having access to the site but this is a checklist you can use in order to find out what is happening.

1. You are not blocking searchers through robots.txt or noindex meta tag.
2. Check servers log in order to see if searchers robots can navigate through the site and also there are no errors.
3. Check (if you are using them) hreflang and canonical meta tag. If they are not implemented correctly, could generate problems.
4. Check if the domain was penalized in the past (before you got it).
5. Check domains DNS (to ensure there are no errors o misconfigurations).
6. Check you linking profile. Maybe you don't have enough popularity.

Although Google says they don't have a sandbox, I encourage you to read this article about Google Sandbox.