How to Fix and Prevent Indexing Issues to Ensure Your Content is Found by Google

So, you’re a business owner or marketer trying to ace the SEO game and edge your competitors to rank at the top of search results. 

But you learn that your web pages are not getting indexed in the first place. No matter how good your content is, if your web page doesn’t show up in search results, your website traffic will take a dent, and you will incur a loss of rankings as well. And most importantly, your potential customers won’t be able to find you.

To achieve that, you need to propel your website’s indexing with a digital wizard (if you are willing to). 

With a robust indexing strategy in place, you can ensure that search engines find, crawl, and store your web pages. These crawlers make your web pages visible in search results. 

In this blog, we share a roadmap to guide you through indexing issues and help to fix them. 

What are the Common Google Indexing Issues? 

How to Check if Your Website Has Indexing Problems? 

How to Fix Google Indexing Issues? 

How to Prevent Future Indexing Issues? 

By the end of this blog, you will be well-equipped to identify and fix site indexing issues.

What are the Common Google Indexing Issues?

Indexing plays a definitive role in SEO because it makes web pages appear in search results. Google’s crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, navigate your website to find new content and update existing ones. 

However, there can be cases when your website may get navigated but not indexed. 

So, if you also keep wondering “why my website does not show up in Google,” here are the common indexing issues that may just be the reason. 

1. Your pages are not indexed at all. 

It may happen because your pages have noindex tags, the robots.txt file prevents crawlers to access those pages, and/or your crawl budget has reached its limit.  

2. Your pages are partially indexed, or only parts of a page are indexed. 

It may happen because of issues with JavaScript (which loads content) and/or poor interlinking within pages. If your website has poor architecture, where some pages are not interlinked at all, crawlers may ignore them. 

3. Your outdated content is still indexed. 

It may happen because of slow crawling on your site or if some pages haven’t been crawled in a long time. Or if your webpages have low-quality content, Google may ignore it from indexing. 

4. Your canonical tags are conflicting with the indexing. 

If you use canonical tags incorrectly, Google might index the outdated versions of your pages. And/or if you have multiple canonical tags for a single page, it may confuse the search engines. 

5. Your web pages are over-indexed. 

Are you wondering what does over-indexing mean? 

When Google indexes more pages on your website than necessary, it’s called over-indexing.  

For example, you have created canonical tags to direct users to a new page, but Google indexes the previous page. Or if you have a large website, and you have reached the crawl budget limit. Over indexing will prohibit fresh pages from indexing in this case. 

Now that you know what causes indexing problems, let’s find out if your website really has those issues. 

How to Check if Your Website Has Indexing Problems? 

There are many tools out there to help you identify indexing issues on your website, but the simplest and free of cost is Google Search Console. Here’s how you can detect your page indexing issues: 

1. Login to your Google Search Console account or create a new account if you don’t have one. 
2. Choose the website property you want to check or create a new website property and complete the verification process. 
3. Go to the “Index” section and click on “Coverage”. (This coverage report shows the indexing status of your web pages.)
4. Look for any errors and/or warnings in terms of crawl errors, issues with the robots.txt file, and noindex tags on pages. 
5. You can also use the URL inspection feature to check the indexing status of a particular web page. 

Next you want to fix the issues. But before we do that, let’s answer a very common question that webmasters are often perplexed about: 

What’s the difference between “Crawled but Not Indexed” and “Discovered but Not Indexed”? 

Most of us confuse crawled with indexed. There is a slight difference between the two. When a URL is crawled by Googlebot, it has been discovered. However the Googlebot may choose to index or not to index it for different reasons. Our objective is to find those indexing issues (if they exist) and fix them. 

Let’s contemplate it with a table. 

	Discovered by Google	Visited by Google	Indexed by Google
Crawled but Not Indexed	Yes	Yes	No
Discovered but Not Indexed	Yes	No	No

Now let’s learn how to fix crawled but not indexed issues. 

How to Fix Google Indexing Issues? 

Here is a step-by-step guide to fixing your existing Google indexing issues. 

1. Optimize your Robots.txt file. 

Your robots.txt file can be located at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Then, check for Disallow directives that may be blocking essential web pages of your site. Ensure that only duplicate pages and the non-essential ones are blocked. 

2. Keep a tab on the “noindex” and “nofollow” tags. 

Noindex is used for pages you don’t want to index, e.g., thank you page, admin page, etc. Similarly, use nofollow tags to prevent search engines from following links that might be untrusted or irrelevant. 

3. Create a clean and updated XML sitemap and submit its URL via Google Search Console. 

You can use tools like Yoast SEO to generate an XML sitemap. Ensure that all your important pages are mentioned in there before submitting it on Google Search Console. 

4. Identify duplicate content on your site and fix your canonical tags. 

You can use tools like Copyscape or SEMrush to identify duplicate content on your website. Try to merge them into single-page content if possible. And use proper canonical tags to tell search engines which page you prefer. 

5. Create a well-organized internal linking structure.

You need to organize your pages into categories and sub-categories. Ensure that your anchor texts are descriptive enough. They will make your site easily navigable for users as well as search engines. 

6. Boost your loading speed and mobile optimization. 

You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate your website’s performance. And by reducing the size of your JavaScript and CSS files, you can increase your site’s loading speed. 

If you follow these steps, you can eradicate indexing issues with ease. But does that ensure there will be no issues in the future? Take a deep breath and read along to ensure your site remains visible and accessible to your potential customers. 

How to Prevent Future Indexing Issues? 

By implementing the below best practices, you can future-proof your site from indexing issues. 

1. You must regularly monitor your site’s indexing status on Google Search Console. You can set up alerts to let you know when Google detects a problem. 
2. You must keep your XML sitemap up to date and resubmit it to ensure Google knows. 
3. You must regularly check and audit your internal links to find and fix any broken ones. Otherwise, once crawled, you will lose traffic unless it’s fixed. 
4. You must regularly create valuable content instead of thin content for Google bots to know that your web pages provide substantial content to users. 
5. Try implementing schema markup (information like product details, reviews, and event dates) to offer additional information to search engines. It will also contribute to your websites SEO. 

And before you catch your breath, catch some of the advanced tips that will future proof your indexing process. 

Pro Tip 1: Generate and review the Index Coverage Report in Google Search Console. It provides in-depth insights into how Google is indexing your website. Use it to replicate for other search engines. 

Pro Tip 2: You can leverage Google’s crawl budget to optimize your site structure and have faster-loading pages. 

Pro Tip 3: You can use Fetch as Google feature in Google Search Console to submit specific URLs for indexing. 

Pro Tip 4: You can optimize your core web vitals, which are a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, to enhance user experience and SEO performance. 

Pro Tip 5: You can use the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework to optimize your web page and create lightweight versions for mobile devices. Then, you can submit them to Google Search Console to speed up indexing and make them load quickly. 

Key Takeaways 

Don’t worry too much about your web pages not getting indexed. It’s a common issue. But take it in your stride to eradicate these issues from its roots. Your website’s SEO will thank you for it. 

So, now that you are accustomed to fixing and preventing indexing issues, you might want to read Unlocking the Secrets of Mobile-First Indexing: Tips and Tricks for Website Optimization.