Your website is your online storefront and virtual business address. You go the extra mile and invest considerable time and money to build a great website and create incredible SEO-optimized content.
But what if your customers can’t find it?
Yes, there are a number of indexing issues that can result in your website not showing in SERPs.
Frustrating, isn’t it?
No matter how well you structure or optimize your website for search results, several common and simple errors practically make your content invisible to the customers.
If your website doesn’t appear on Google, it might as well not exist at all.
With over 92 percent market share, Google is the largest search engine with anywhere between 30-50 billion indexed web pages.
Moreover, Google is constantly updating its index, and web pages are being crawled, changed, added, and removed. If Google crawlers find an error or a web page doesn’t abide by its guidelines, there’s a good chance it won’t be indexed, no matter how great the content is.
In essence, if your website or any of its web pages aren’t indexed, it won’t show up in search results. Since the website/web pages aren’t indexed, they wouldn’t rank as well. It kills your SEO optimization efforts to drive traffic and engagement, generate leads, or boost sales.
In this article, we will briefly cover how to identify common indexing issues and resolve them.
How To Check If Your Side Is Indexed Or Not? – Ensure Search Visibility
Before you get into resolving any indexing issue, it’s essential to check if your website is indexed or not.
This is a common practice every SEO, website owner, and webmaster must engage in ideally.
To do this, type “site:yourwebsite.com” into the search bar on Google, and you’ll get the list of pages indexed on Google.
If your website isn’t indexed, there won’t be any results.
Alternatively, you can also check if your site is indexed or not on Google Search Console. Check the number of valid pages, both with and without warnings.
If the figure for these two categories adds up to anything other than zero, there are some web pages indexed. If the total equals zero, it means your entire website is not indexed.
How to Index a Particular Web Page?
If you checked your website through the methods mentioned above and found there are web pages, blog posts, or other pieces of content not showing on SERPs, you can request indexing through the URL Inspection Tool on Google Search Console.
Don’t know how to do it?
Let us walk you through it –
- Open Google Search Console
- Go To URL Inspection Tool
- Paste the URL of the webpage you want indexed into the search bar.
- Let Google verify and check the URL.
- Once done, press the “Request Indexing” button.
However, this solution doesn’t guarantee that the concerned web page will be indexed if there are other unresolved underlying issues.
Also, this solution only works if there are a few pages that aren’t indexed. If your entire website is missing, there are probably errors in your website setting related to meta tags or robots.txt that need to be identified and resolved at the earliest.
Entire Website Isn’t Showing on Google’s SERP? - The Onsite SEO Optimization Fix!
One of the common indexing concerns found in websites that are not listed on Google is an underlying problem in their site’s robots.txt file.
To fix this, first, go to yourwebsitename.com/robots.txt
Look for these code snippets –
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
These code snippets tell Google crawlers not to crawl your website’s pages. In some cases, it might be some specific web pages being disallowed for crawling by Google bots. Using the URL Inspection Tool can help in finding these unindexed pages while checking, as it gives a ‘blocked by robots.txt’ error message.
Now, having discussed the basics, let us discuss some of the other most common Google indexing problems –
Common Google Indexing Issues Impacting Your Website’s Search Visibility
Newly Built Website
Wait for a while after your website goes live before it starts showing in SERPs. Yes, you need to give Google some time before it crawls and indexes your website.
When will the site get indexed after going live?
Well, there’s no definite timeline to this, and it varies drastically. From a few hours to a few weeks or anywhere in between, there’s no way to predict exactly how long before Google indexes your website.
Newly Revamped Website
If you’ve recently rebranded, revamped, and redesigned your website or made significant changes to it, there’s a good chance that Google takes time before recrawling and reindexing it.
You can submit a recrawl through Google Search Console if you’ve made changes to improve your website’s efficiency and performance.
The perfect way to do it is to ensure you follow Google’s guidelines to the T, inspect the URL, and then request indexing. It will help index the pages that aren’t indexed quickly, ensuring better search visibility for your website.
Missing Sitemap – Important SEO Optimization Technique
It’s important for your website’s architecture to be optimally organized, making sitemap extremely crucial for your website’s SEO optimization as well as search visibility.
Sitemap is basically a structured list of all your website’s content, including pages, files, videos, images, and the relationship between them.
A sitemap is essential for Google Crawlers to crawl each and every page of your website efficiently. If your website doesn’t have an XML sitemap, make sure to add one right away. Don’t use HTMP sitemap, as the XML alternative is better in terms of SEO optimization.
Once the sitemap is created, submit it via Google Search Console or add it to your website’s robots.txt file.
Poor Site Structure – Hampering Search Visibility
Your website may not be indexed if it lacks an intuitive, well-organized, and optimized site structure.
Google continually brings in new updates to improve its search results and focuses on ranking websites higher that offer excellent user experience.
If your website doesn’t have an optimized site structure, it is guaranteed to give your users a tough time navigating through the site.
This will also negatively impact the crawl efficacy of Google bots, which may result in lower rankings or even no indexing at times.
Fix this issue by improving your website’s structure and integrating intuitive linking to improve user experience.
The best way to do this is by adding breadcrumbs to your website, allowing users to navigate easily while opening up new linking opportunities. It also helps with drastically improving your website’s ranking.
Orphan Pages
If you’ve pages that aren’t indexed, check if these are orphan pages or not. There are pages on websites that aren’t linked to the rest of the site, which are often ignored or aren’t crawled by Google.
If you find these orphan pages on your website, connect them with the rest of your website via internal linking.
If these orphan pages aren’t necessarily useful, contain low-quality or duplicate content, or can be comprehended as a doorway page by Google, consider removing these pages altogether.
If you remove orphan pages, don’t forget to add 301 redirects to other relevant web pages, especially if the orphan page carries a backlink.
Webpage Is Not Mobile-Friendly
Another reason why your website or specific pages on your website aren’t indexed is that they’re not mobile-friendly.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, Google may consider not indexing it at all. This is because Google prioritizes and encourages mobile-friendliness because more than half of all the searches online are from mobile devices.
It is an important SEO optimization technique for building a responsive website with fast loading times, adaptable design, and compressed images.
Check ADA Compliance for Enhanced Search Visibility
Your website’s accessibility can also lead to indexing problems, especially if it doesn’t follow ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Compliance.
Make sure that your website can be seamlessly navigated using keyboard-only commands, contains alt text, and follows other accessibility protocols for the disabled.
You can check your website’s accessibility and see if it complies with the ADA or not by using various online tools. Consider making changes to your website’s design to make it ADA-compliant, eliminating any accessibility-related indexing problems.
Low-Quality Content
Google prioritizes user experience and high-quality content, and if your website contains low-quality, thin, or keyword-stuffed content, the chances of it getting indexed are low.
Make sure the content on your website is high-quality and focuses on offering value to the users. While adding relevant keywords to the content is essential for SEO optimization, make sure you don’t overdo it.
Keep the content organic, engaging, and search engine optimized. If this sounds too much for you, hiring professional SEO writers can help resolve this issue.
In essence, the content you publish on your website must follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Tags Related Indexing Issues
Tags are used in the code snippets to inform Googlebots if these pages are to be crawled or not. These tags are useful in ensuring Google doesn’t crawl the pages you don’t want to be indexed, but they can prove to be catastrophic if accidentally applied to the entire website.
To identify this issue, check Meta tags on your site’s web pages.
Web pages with these Meta tags in their header section won’t be indexed.
These are called Meta robot tags and are used to inform Google that the specific pages carrying those are not to be indexed.
Engaging in deep technical SEO analysis of your website using various SEO optimization tools can help reveal the pages with these tags.
You can resolve this issue by simply removing this tag manually or using SEO plugins and tools to implement site-wide changes.
Broken Internal Links
Broken internal links can be a major hiccup when indexing relevant pages on Google. This is because when Googlebot comes across broken links and is unable to follow through and access the linked page, it may result in these pages getting de-indexed.
To resolve this issue, simply audit your website periodically and identify broken links. You can do this using Google Search Console or any other SEO tool which can comprehensively analyze your website.
Once broken links are identified, update them or redirect them. It helps improve the search visibility of your website and gets rid of incessant indexing troubles.
Incorrect Canonical Tags – Costly SEO Optimization Error
If your website has multiple URLs showcasing similar content, it’s important to use Canonical tags.
However, it’s also important to tell Google which of these URLs you want to prioritize and index. If not, Google will decide on your behalf, and it may not be the page you want to be indexed, resulting in the wrong page being indexed.
To identify and resolve this issue, run a thorough site audit to determine if there are canonical issues on your website. You can either use various SEO optimization tools or conduct a thorough audit manually.
If this doesn’t seem like your cup of tea, consider hiring technical SEO experts to audit your website, identify the indexing issues, and resolve them without disturbing your website’s structure.
Google Penalties
If you’re unable to find any reason why your page isn’t getting indexed, it might be worth checking if your website is penalized by Google. There are many reasons why Google often imposes penalties on websites engaging in unnatural link building, adding malicious web pages to the websites, having malicious redirects, and so on.
If you’re regularly going against the Google Webmasters Guidelines, there’s a possibility your website would be penalized and not get indexed.
You can review the penalties you’ve received through Google Search Console under the “Security and Manual Actions” tab.
Here, you’ll find the list of penalties your website has received and instructions on how to proceed.
Conclusion
Indexing problems aren’t a one-time thingy when you launch your website, but are something you need to constantly monitor.
This is why auditing your website routinely is the key to identifying indexing concerns promptly, allowing you to implement fixes before they cause major issues or lower your overall search visibility.
Indexing-related issues can crop up anytime due to various reasons, including Google updates, hosting provider issues, Google bugs, website updates, security updates, and so on.
If you’ve been facing issues with indexing your website or any of its specific pages, it might be due to some of the common indexing issues discussed above.
Implement the fixes timely, and enjoy the enhanced search engine visibility, traffic, engagement, and revenue you aim for!
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