Have Google indexing problems? Join the crew.
Indexing issues are among the most irritating ones because oftentimes it’s hard to know what’s causing it.
But not to worry, we pulled out the most common Google indexing problems that may prevent Google from indexing your pages.
Roll your sleeves up, here we go!
What is Google Indexing?
Indexing simply resembles a library, where books are replaced by web pages.
So, to show up on the search engine result page (SERP), the web page has to be indexed. Or in other words, you can say that Google finds and saves the pages to offer them on SERP to the user.
Then, after that, the process of analyzing content starts. Google sees for what queries is your content relevant and other things.
Indexing is Step 0 to getting organic traffic. That’s what makes it a must situation for your web pages to get indexed.
Now, let’s look up the most common Google indexing issues and go through how to improve Google indexing.
10 Most Common Google Indexing Problems
1. No Domain Name
If your put your site live without a domain name, the only way to access the website would be through its IP address.
In this case, Google won’t be able to find your site and hence, your site won’t be indexed.
How to check?
If the website does not have a domain name, then your IP address will show up on the place of the domain.
How to solve it?
You need to check that the URL is set up in the right manner in the hosting website you use. And to redirect the traffic from the IP version of the site you can use the 301 redirects to the domain version of the website.
2. Mobile-Friendliness
As Google now works with the mobile-first approach, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
Even if you have the got everything the user needs in your content but the web page is not suitable to view on a smartphone, you’re gonna lose a lot.
How to check?
Google has offered a precise free tool that you can use to check whether the website is mobile-friendly or not.
Tool: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool
You have to enter the domain of your website and the tool will go through your site and check the mobile-friendliness of your website.
How to improve it?
The tool also provides some suggestions after giving the overview score of the mobile-friendliness of your website.
Or you can learn some proven practices that work here: How to Mobile Optimize Your Site
3. Using Coding language in a Complex Way
Google does not index websites that use a coding language in a complex way.
No difference whether the language is an old one or a new one like JavaScript. If the settings are not in the right order, the crawling and indexing issues will arise.
How to check?
Once again, you can check the issue through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.
The tool will highlight the issue if you have it.
How to solve it?
They offer many resources with appropriate guidelines that you can follow to solve the issue. You can follow them to get your website’s code in a straight and easy way that Google will index.
4. Site Speed
The sites that load slowly are less likely to show up on the top results of a Google search. This is because Google wants to offer the best to its users and slow-loading websites aren’t the thing the users want.
Though the reason could be a lot of things, from too much content to an old-fashioned server. There are more things that can slow down your website than you can count on your fingers.
How to check?
Google has offered an amazing tool for this one too.
Google Page Speed Insights, just enter the domain and the tool will provide you with a report and possible solutions to help you out.
How to improve?
The tool offers pretty enough solutions to help you improve the speed of your site.
But if you still got any issues, you can simply read the best practices to improve the site speed here: Why Website Speed Is Important And How To Increase Page Speed.
5. Quality Content
Well, this one surely isn’t an obvious one.
We know quality content is quite important to make a website rank and gain organic traffic. But does it affects indexing?
There’s no straight answer to it but there is a talk going around that having minimal well-written content can be a cause of Google indexing problems.
The theory is, that if your site has too minimal well-written content, then you will be least likely to get any organic traffic. And having too less of visitors can make Google think that your site is not much important to index.
How to check?
There ain’t much to look into, you would already know if your site has thin content.
How to solve it?
Simply start writing quality content and update it on the website more frequently.
You can learn how to add quality to a piece of content here: 8 Tips to Improve Your Content and Keep Google Happy.
6. User-Friendliness and Engaging
Through the eyes of SEO, a site must be user-friendly and engaging to perform well.
If people are having issues navigating your site or figuring out how to perform a specific action then your site will have a hard time chasing the top ranks.
This can lead Google to index your site less than the usual and shift their focus to a better competitor.
How to check?
You can ask a friend or a family member for navigation issues. Look if there are any distractions such as ads above the fold.
How to solve it?
Here are some suggestions that you can take to improve the user-friendliness of the website:
- Improve the navigation (try changing the theme or design)
- Remove ads above the fold
- Implement a better internal linking structure
- Try adding an HTML sitemap on the website visible to users
7. Plugin Blocking Googlebot from Crawling
There are plugins that do block Googlebot from crawling your website, the most common of them is a robots.txt plugin.
By adding a specific code, the robots.txt plugin signal Googlebot not to crawl that webpage and hence, it remains unindexed.
How to check?
Go to your robots.txt file, which will look somewhat like this,
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If there is a “/” in front of disallow, then that means the robots.txt plugin is blocking the further instructed pages.
How to solve it?
All you have to do is change the code a bit and make it look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Just leave the disallow empty and the Google indexing problem is solved.
8. More Than One Domain Property
It is possible that there is more than one variation of your website’s domain. Especially in the case where the website is shifted from http:// to https://.
You must add and verify all the domain variations in Google Search Console. Adding and verifying all of them ensures that you’re tracking the right ones and your audience is not going on the wrong variation.
How to check?
Try searching for “http://yourdomain.com” and then “https://yourdomain.com”. If the results do not get directed to the same site, then you have different variations of your website hanging around the web.
How to solve it?
Just add and verify all the variations in GSC (Google Search Console). If needed, you can add redirects to the other variations leading them to the main one.
Miscellaneous Google Indexing Issues
9. Sitemap
A sitemap is required!
A sitemap is a rundown of all the pages on your website that Google may use to determine what content you have. This tool will assist Google Search Console in crawling and indexing all of your pages.
Without a sitemap, Google will know nothing of your website unless your web pages are actively indexed and receiving traffic.
HTML Sitemaps, on the other hand, are no longer recommended by Google Search Console. XML Sitemaps are now the most used sitemap format.
You want to utilise your sitemap to inform Google which pages on your site are the most essential, and you want to submit it on a regular basis so that it may be crawled and indexed.
10. Crawl Budget
A crawl budget is basically a number that sets the limit on how pages Googlebot will crawl on your website. Every website has a crawl budget set for them.
You can check your website’s crawl budget in the Crawl Stats Report on GSC.
There might be the case for large websites, when your website hits the limit, Google will stop indexing any more pages from your website.
The issue can be solved either deleting specific pages after a website audit. Or adding code signalling Google not to index some specific pages.
Is Google Indexing My SIte?
To figure out if your site is getting indexed by Google or not, search “site:” and the URL of your site right ahead without space. For instance, “site:yoursite.com/”
The results show the Google search console index coverage of your site. That means all the pages that have been indexed by Google. If none of your pages shows up, then that means that your site hasn’t been indexed till now.
But if your site has too many pages, and you want to check it for a specific page then this method won’t work for sure.
In that case, you can simply go to the Google search console, and head to the search bar at the header of the page. Enter the link that you wanna check and hit enter.
The result will tell you if the page is crawled and indexed or not.
The Bottom Line
Indexing is the “Step 0” of your SEO journey.
And you wouldn’t want to mess the very first things up. Hence, look out for the most common Google indexing problems that we’ve mentioned above. Through the process suggested above, you can make sure that you get rid of the issues fast and easy.
I hope you would have found all the answers you were looking for, if not then the comment box is wide open for you. Or you can mail us your query at [email protected]. We will live to help you out.
Also, Thank You For Reading Along. It Means A Lot To Us.
