If you’ve been producing fairly good and worthy content and you realized it’s not being indexed in Google, there could be some of the following explanations. The Google search engine indexing system processes a lot of different parameters, beginning with the content uniqueness and ending with technical settings, so even the smallest missteps can cause pages not to be indexed. In the section below, we walk you through critical factors that may be causing Google not to crawl your page, as well as the remedies.
1. “Noindex” Tags on Pages
If one wants their search engine bots to ignore some webpages, they can use the “noindex” meta tag for the benefit of one’s internal search, for example, or a login page. However, if this tag is mistakenly added to important pages, then it will not allow them to be placed on the index. Remember, with the use of page headers, one should always review the page headers to verify the “noindex” tag is not being employed.
Solution: The last tip is to always be checking the website source code, at least once after modifications, to check if valuable pages have been indexing with “noindex.”
2. Blocked by Robots.txt File
When it comes to controlling the crawl activity of the search engine, the robots.txt file gives the directions whether to crawl or ignore any page. When set wrongly, it can lock out whole parts of your site. Failure to implement a robot.txt file is acceptable, but if you do have this file, you should make sure that it is properly set up to let the search engine robots crawl and index important pages.
Solution: The easiest way to do so is to check for no crucial pages with Google Search Console’s “robots.txt Tester." If there are some changes in the file, then modify it and allow Google’s crawlers to have access.
If you need additional tips and tricks on working with robots.txt, you can read this article on its usage here.
3. Technical SEO Problems
It should be understood that there can be technical problems that may prevent the Google bot from indexing your site. Some of the known issues are long time to complete the page, broken links, and the page having many scripts that make it more difficult for the crawler to access.
Solution: Make sure you do a technical audit using Google's Page Speed and Search Console, take time to repair any broken link, and minimize page loading time in order to make it crawlable and indexable.
For technical SEO tips, find out how small businesses can optimize SEO here.
4. Duplicate Content
Google really wants to serve users with unique content; hence, similar or even the same can frequently be ignored. Mostly, this happens at eCommerce websites, especially product descriptions that are identical or the very same material on multiple pages.
Solution: Merge similar pages where applicable or include canonical tags, sending visitors to the preferred version.
5. Poor or Thin Content
Not valuable enough, too short, or unoriginal content won't be indexed by Google. Good content is informative, structured, and comprehensive content that answers your user's queries and adds value to the web. If it's high-quality content, that means Google wants to index your page.
For more on how to create content for Google, check here.
6. Lack of backlinks
Backlinks are important for Google to find new pages. If a page lacks links pointing to it both from within your website and other websites, Google will not find it.
Solution: You must make sure to create internal links all over your website to improve discoverability and look for quality backlinks from other trusted external websites to enhance authority.
7. Web Design Problems (JavaScript or Flash)
Web sites designed with JavaScript or Flash programming languages present some difficulties to Google’s spiders—they often just pass by the content embedded in scripts. Just how commission-heavy your Web site depends on JavaScript without fallbacks, it may well restrict what Google is capable of indexing.
Solution: When possible, use HTML so that your site should be crawlable. One can use services such as Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to see how Google views the page.
8. Recent Changes or New Pages
If you are running a new site, or if you have created new pages or modified the existing ones, you will have to wait for Google crawlers to find them and index them, especially if your site is not frequently updated or receives few visitors.
Solution: Use the Google Search Console ‘URL Inspection’ instrument for asking for fresh or modified pages to be indexed. This can fasten it.
9. Server and Hosting Issues
When a server or hosting is down, Google would not be able to crawl your sites, hence causing a delay in indexing. Google’s bots tend to adjust the crawl rate if they experience server-related issues.
Solution: Check the server uptime and make a good selection of the right hosting company. There are often crawl errors, and you can use a feature available in Google’s Search Console like Crawl Stats Report to receive a notification of such a problem.
10. Indexing Limits and Crawl Budget
Google sets up a so-called “crawl budget," which means how many pages Google will crawl in a given amount of time. The particular misfortune is that, if your site includes a large amount of pages, some of them ranked less important can remain unindexed.
Solution: Internal linking should be used as a tool to guide the crawler to prioritize key pages while at the same time ignoring non-core pages.
Conclusion
To make sure Google will crawl and index your content, you need to pay attention to settings, quality, and user experience. Drawing on each of these factors, it is possible to increase the popularity of your site to receive more organic traffic. Do not forget to monitor results provided by Google Search Console and make necessary changes to your SEO strategies, which respond to the new Google’s algorithms.
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