Home / Google News / Google SEO / Google Can Temporarily Protect Important URLs From Being Deindexed

Nov 5, 2026 - 7:21 am

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Gary Illyes from Google said that when important URLs serve a 4xx status code, Google Search can "temporarily protect the URL from falling out of the index right away." Meaning, Google Search will still show the URL in Google Search, for a short while, just to make sure searchers can still find it.

Gary posted this comment on LinkedIn in response to VLC, the VLC media player website, not showing a favicon in the Google Search results. It shows this and also notice the home page is number two, under the download page:

SEOs were asking why is the favicon missing. Gary explained that the folks at VLC for some reason served the teapot - 418 status code and Google obviously treats it like it treats "most other 4xx errors : basically "not found," Gary wrote.

So why didn't Google drop it from the index?…