If you do any kind of website marketing then you will know that one of the most important steps in this process is making sure your site’s content is crawled and indexed by search engines like Google. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for websites to have issues where their content is either not crawled or crawled, but not indexed by Google. This can have a major impact on your site rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) which ultimately could have a knock-on effect to your organic traffic/performance levels. In this article, we’ll cover the most common reasons for these Google indexing issues and give you some tips on how to approach and resolve them.
Technical SEO Issues: A Major Barrier to Proper Indexing
Proper technical SEO is needed for your website to be indexed appropriately by Google As a client, you need to become acquainted with keywords. Your site represents your business on the World Wide Web, so you need to know how to do seach engine optimisation – technically, as well as otherwise. The most common technical SEO mistakes include improper robots.txt files, or misuse of meta tags such as ‘noindex’. When search engine spiders (or crawlers) detect directives in the robots.txt files not to crawl certain parts of your website, this content will never be included in the index. Even if the content is of the highest quality and super-relevant to its niche, it’ll never be picked up if it’s not crawled. The same technology, properly used, can be beneficial. For example, instead of wasting time crawling and indexing all of the content within your website’s sitemap, you can use certain techniques to instruct Google to crawl only those portions of the site that interest you or your target audience. Similarly, the ‘noindex’ meta tag is less harmful (or at least, less impactful) when it’s used deliberately, on specific webpages that you don’t want Google to index and that aren’t especially relevant to the main content.
Another common technical issue that can be a root cause for your indexation problems is website speed. And this is not surprising because Google’s systems prioritize fast-loading websites in their results. There is also evidence that sites that load slowly can be crawled less often, or not at all. Factors such as large image files, poorly written code, and a lack of caching can all result in slower time-to-first-byte, the amount of time it takes to display page content. Other issues with website architecture such as URL depth, or having many URLs without an XML sitemap can also inhibit Google’s crawlers from accessing your content. For many of the technical issues mentioned above, employing someone with some technical knowledge and know-how to fix these problems is crucial to seeing improvements to your SEO and its ability to effectively index your site.
Content Quality and Relevance: The Foundation of Successful Indexing
Google and other quality search engines will index quality content: articles, videos, infographics that are relevant and valuable to the users who are searching for them. If your content crosses the line from ‘duplicate’ to ‘spam’ or is not worth indexing for other reasons, it will likely be crawled but not indexed. Duplicate content is lethal to an SEO indexing strategy. Multiple pages of a website all including identical or similar-enough content can leave a search bot with the decision to include none at all. Which of those duplicates is the original? Or the most relevant? Should the page with the higher page rank be included while the other is left out? Leave those decisions to the algorithms, and you’re lost. If your content is valuable, unique and – most of all – appreciated by users, there’s no need to worry.
Another cause of the index not acknowledging your content can be that it’s too thin or not thorough enough. Google’s algorithms reward articles that have good in-depth backing to them. Thin content, on the other hand, tends to be shorter, poorly structured and lack more than a summary of existing information on a topic. Thin content is unlikely to make it into a search engine’s index. Old content becomes less relevant over time. If some content on your website was last updated a long time ago, it’s less likely to appear in search engine results pages in the future. Adding to existing content regularly and improving it keeps it relevant, so it remains in the index longer and has a greater chance of ranking higher.
Crawl Budget: Managing How Search Engines Discover Your Content
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will process from a site within any given period of time. The actual budget represents a limit of what a search engine believes it needs to process from a site. The greater the number of pages on your site, the poorer its overall health and the quality of its content, the more likely it is that you will exceed your crawl budget. In fact, you might even be lucky enough to exceed it twice in a row while there are still many millions of pages left to be crawled. This will mean that several pages will never be indexed, resulting in a massive headache for your SEO indexing. Just ask MySpace. Crawl budget is most critical to large sites with hundreds of thousands of pages or more. Every SEO will tell you crawl budget is an important factor. Crawling and indexing efficiency is a very important element of ranking on the first page of anything.
Lastly, to control your crawl budget, you’ll need to make sure that the pages that you do want to be indexed receive the biggest amount of spotlight. Improving the site architecture to have your prominent pages accessible in the least number of clicks from your homepage and from indexable pages is essential, as well as using internal links as a foundation for crawlers to navigate your site. It is also recommended to get rid of as much non-critical or low-value pages as possible so that the rest of your important content isn’t basically a mess of repetitive information that scares the crawler straight away. Google Search Console offers both tools to monitor your crawl budget allocation and identify possible issues affecting your indexing via SEO.
Website Security: The Impact of HTTPS and Safe Browsing on Indexing
Security-related issues can impact SEO specifically at the indexing stage. Searchengines still and always prioritise secure websites in their results; HTTPS is one of the biggest security issues impacting SEO, and one where Google has openly stated that it will use as a ranking factor. Websites not using HTTPS might flag for users as ‘Not Secure’ in their browser, making visiting those sites unappealing. And in terms of user security, Google might decide not to index them – especially if websites deal with sensitive information, such as personal data or payment information.
Malware or harmful pages on your site might compromise indexing – if Google determines that your site’s been hacked or its security compromised, it might choose to deindex entire pages to protect users, which can result in catastrophic traffic and visibility losses. Make sure your site is securely hosted, regularly scanned, and updated for all vulnerabilities, and that you’re compliant with standard industry best practices to ensure your website’s SEO index is as healthy as possible. Use SSL certificates and firewalls, for instance, to ensure a secure infrastructure, and make sure your site receives regular, well-vetted updates. While these are only some of the factors that might affect SEO indexing health, having strong site security and addressing PCI compliance go a long way toward preventing major hacks or attack vectors that might cause your site to be deindexed.
Mobile Optimization: Ensuring Indexing in a Mobile-First World
In light of Google’s rollout of mobile-first indexing, it is more important than ever to make sure your site is fully optimised for mobile. Google’s ability to crawl and index your site is based on how well your site is optimised for mobile. Google’s crawl budget for your site depicts how Google views your mobile site, and if your mobile site is not well-optimised, you may end up experiencing indexing problems. Slow mobile page speeds, poor mobile design, and unresponsive mobile elements are widespread problems that can lead to issues where pages are crawled but not indexed. Given the prevalence of mobile devices these days, failing to properly mobile-optimise your site seriously hampers your efforts with SEO indexing.
You’ll want a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes and devices. You’ll want your images and other media to be optimised for mobile, you’ll want your mobile site to load quickly, and you’ll want all interactive elements to be accessible on mobile. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and PageSpeed Insights are two awesome tools that you can use to check your mobile optimisation and fix the problems you encounter. If you want your unique content to get indexed and ranked for mobile search, focusing on mobile optimisation is one of the best things you can do.
External Factors: Understanding the Role of Backlinks and Social Signals in Indexing
International future considerations such as backlinks and social signals will also make a difference. Some examples of aspects that are necessary for good search engine optimisation (SEO) indexing are: backlinks. Backlinks are when other, better-ranked and more authoritative sites, link back to you. This lets search engines know that your content is important and worth indexing. For new sites and/or less established websites, there might be few to no backlinks, while an excellent backlink profile could signal to search engines that your content deserves to be indexed and to have a higher priority then similar content. The importance of having a solid ‘web’ of high-quality backlinks demonstrates how building up international future resources can be helpful in overcoming challenges of getting indexed.
Social signals are also of consequence. These are the social media shares, likes, comments and all other types of social engagement we all experience on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and every kind of social media service out there. The direct effect of social signals, which we can easily measure (how many shares, likes and comments does your content get?), on SEO is disputed but there is proof that if your content is widely shared and expressed on social media, your chances of getting indexed by search engines increase. This is because social activity can be translated into more visits on your website, which means crawlers and indexing bots from search engines will then be willing to visit and index your pages more frequently than their automated regimen would have dictated. Maintaining an active presence on social media and building high-quality links are two external factors to focus on if you want to maximise your SEO index chances.
Conclusion
SEO indexing issues can severely impact your website’s visibility and performance in search engine results. By understanding the key reasons behind these problems—such as technical SEO issues, content quality, crawl budget, website security, mobile optimization, and external factors—you can take proactive steps to ensure your content is properly indexed. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach that includes optimizing technical elements, producing high-quality content, managing crawl budgets, securing your site, ensuring mobile compatibility, and leveraging external factors like backlinks and social signals. By doing so, you can improve your chances of achieving better search engine rankings, driving more organic traffic, and ultimately achieving greater success in your online marketing efforts.
