High authority мedium article dissapeared from index after Aug Core Update (index tag is still there)

Hello,

I have a мedium publication and a few of my cornerstone articles disappeared from Google Index during the Aug Core Update. While all of them still have index tag.

A few things to mention:
1) The articles that disappeared from index are review content (e.g. "best *X* businesses")
2) The directory "мedium.com/publication" still performs ok after August Update, but only a few among ~30 review articles disappeared from index
3) Some of these URLs had spam attack (overoptimized exact match anchor ratio comment links) back in 2020
4) Grammarly AI detector says one of them "51% of your document appears to be AI-generated" on another "No Al-generated text detected" but both dropped from index.
5) Reindexing these URLs doesn't work.

Any suggestions on how to get them indexed?

did you try fixing the anchors? Anchor text abuse is one of the most sensitive things that can cause penalty, so I'd start with that by removing the comments with excessive anchors, or by building more links with other anchors to dilute the problematic ones...

Something else I can think of (although this is just a hunch of mine, not a certainty) is that the reviews that got removed might have contained content that talks negatively about a big brand and google didn't like it (because I firmly believe that all of these big companies - google, apple, amazon, microsoft, etc - are all BFFs behind closed doors and are in for the ripping-off of common citizens together, like hyenas) so they had to take your pages down.

If you remove whatever bit of info google deemed defamatory to companies like Amazon, Apple (or even to google themselves), etc you might be able to get the pages back. Not guaranteed, but it could happen...

It could also be that someone (a competitor maybe?) DMCAd / forced Medium to take your content down for whatever reason...

Or, maybe one of the goals of google's last update is to crack down on parasites, and you've been among the 1st victims...

tazarbm said:

Or, maybe one of the goals of google's last update is to crack down on parasites, and you've been among the 1st victims...

Click to expand...

The march update definitely targeted parasites.

From Google themselves:

Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site's strong reputation. For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.

Click to expand...

Source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-march-2024/

Due to Google update many changes occured so that's the main reason.