10 Reasons Why Google Isn’t Indexing Your Website?
Correctness Tone suggestions Full-sentence rewritesIt is an established fact that growing your website and business is dependent on organic traffic. According to a survey, more than 50% of your site’s traffic is linked with organic search. The statistics are of no use if you aren’t appearing in the search results. You might be curious to know how to get your site, blog, and web pages indexed by Google. There are two different choices that you can go for. The first one would be to go for the “tortoise” approach. You would have to sit back and wait for what will happen, and the process can take weeks or months.
The other way around is to make it happen now. It will require you to invest your time and energy and write and share high-quality content for obvious reasons. There could be a case where you might be making mistakes that aren’t getting your site indexed.
It is certainly a nightmare for every business that is pulling up Google to search your valuable keywords, and your site is showing nowhere. It will surely turn all your morale down. So let’s get to know about the top reasons why Google not indexing your website.
1- Site Isn’t Mobile-Friendly
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then there are pretty much chances that you will not be able to index it. It is specifically more relevant since mobile-first indexing has been introduced. Even if you have curated highly relevant and strong content, and it isn’t optimized for tablets or smartphones, you will surely lose traffic and ranking.
The mobile optimization of a website is certainly not difficult at all. You can do this by simply adding responsive design principles like CSS media queries or fluid grids. You would have to make sure that the users could navigate the site without experiencing any problems. By running your site through a Mobile-Friendly Testing tool, you can do this. In this regard, your side should get “passed reading” to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly.
2- Site Has Little to No Well-Written Content
There isn’t any doubt that well-written content is the key to succeeding in Google search results. If you have minimal content on your site that isn’t beating your competitors, then it is undoubtedly a significant issue, and you will not be able to break even the top 50. As per studies, content that is less than 1000 words doesn’t perform well compared to content that is more than 1000 words. You might think that word count is a ranking factor, but it isn’t. However, when you are in the quest for what to do next, then you need to make sure that the content is well-written and free of any kind of plagiarism. The content should be informative enough and unique. It must be formulated in a way that it can cater to the needs of the readers. You must present a different view from other sites working in your niche. Moreover, you can facilitate yourself with a spell check tool to write your content well. Google always prefers to show error-free content results to its users
If you are not working on all these aspects, then there are chances that Google will find another site working on these ends. There could be a case where you might be following all the search engine best practices but not ranking in the search results; the reason could be content. You need to work on this end to get indexation and ranking.
3- Site’s Loading Speed Is Slow
If your site has a slow-loading speed, then Google will be less likely to feature it in their index results. There could be a case where your site might be taking time to load; it may be due to multiple factors. The reason could be placing too much content on the page, or you might be using an outdated server that comes with limited resources.
You can utilize Page Speed Insights for this purpose. It is surely one of the great tools because it helps in getting you to know which areas or sections are the ones that need improvement. The tool analyzes web pages against the performance factors of a site. These factors are the ones which are crucial for having faster loading sites. It includes minimizing connections, leveraging browser caching, reducing payload size, etc. It will help you out in improving each aspect of your site.
4- Mets Tags Are Set to Noindex or Nofollow
There could be bad luck where you might have set the meta tags to no-index or no-follow. There could be multiple pages that may be getting affected by it. For example, suppose there is a page, which isn’t indexed by Google’s crawler, and then it is deleted before the change takes place. In this regard, the page wouldn’t be re-indexed if created using a page recovery plugin. Google will not be able to index your webpage.
So it's important to check your meta tags before publishing any content or a particular page. Use proper tags so that all your hard work pays you off not just wasted.
5- Site Isn’t Engaging the Audience
It is essential to have a user-friendly and engaging site for boosting your SEO efforts. The search engines will rank your site high in the search results if you are good at engaging the audience. Google and other search engines will only rank sites that are likely to facilitate the users in terms of a good user experience. You must ensure that the users do not feel aggravated or frustrated while interacting with your site. Google and other search engines don’t want to rank web pages that take forever to load. Your site shouldn’t have confusing navigation.
Suppose you have published a blog without proper content research and keyword research. This could likely be the reason behind not getting indexation or ranking. You need to identify the content gaps and target the relevant keywords, but that’s not at all; there is a need to link all the posts back to the topic.
In addition, there is a need to enhance the internal linking to easily navigate the users. It will let Google understand that you are providing quality and good results to the users.
6- Missing Sitemap
The sitemap is essential for a website, especially if you want to index your site. Simply put, the sitemap is a list of pages on your site. It helps search engines know what content they are offering users. You can get your pages crawled or indexed through Google Search Console.
If there is no sitemap, then Google will become blind unless all your web pages are indexed or receiving traffic. You need to bear in mind that the HTML sitemaps are deprecated in the Google search console. However, XML sitemaps are preferred these days. Google determines the important pages of your site through the sitemap. In this regard, you must submit the sitemap for crawling and indexing purposes.
7- Weak Technical SEO
There isn’t any doubt that buying technical SEO from Fiverr is similar to buying a BMW from a dollar shop.; it will likely be a counterfeit item rather than the original one. The chances that your users and Google will be smitten with you if you excel at technical SEO are pretty good. Suppose your site is not hitting core web vitals numbers; the technical SEO will help you out in this regard. It will not be the right approach to put your faith in the strategic audit to unearthing the issues. It is because the issues can be either downright simple or incredibly complex.
In another case scenario, if Google not indexing the site. It is certainly an incredibly complex matter. Again, you will require a seasoned technical SEO audit to uncover the issues so that they should be repaired accordingly.
In short, technical SEO is the one, which helps you in getting you rescued from the deep. However, there are sites, which are complex enough, and tackling them with the right approach becomes extremely difficult. In this regard, either you have to learn technical SEO or hire a specialist for this purpose.
8- Usage of JavaScript to Render Content
The usage of JavaScript in itself isn’t an issue that causes indexing problems. There isn’t any rule that can state JS is the issue behind causing problems. There is a need to look at each individual site and then diagnose the issues.
Furthermore, the JS is the thing that creates problems in preventing crawling through shady things. There are techniques, which may be akin to cloaking.
If you are hiding your JS or CSS files, then you do not need to do this. Google has mentioned several times that they want to look at your JS and CSS files for crawling purposes. Never block any files, and if they are blocked, then make sure to unblock them to give full crawling access to Google.
9- The Site has a Redirect Loop
The redirect loops are also one of the issues that prevent indexing. However, it is generally caused by typos and can be fixed easily.
Let’s make it understandable; firstly, you need to find the page that is causing a redirect loop. If you are using WordPress, then you need to find the HTML source of one of your posts. Afterward, you need to look for the .htaccess file and start looking for “Redirect 301”. It will let you know which page is trying to direct the traffic. You can also repair 302 redirect errors by making sure they are set to 301. You also need to find the typos to make sure there aren’t any duplicate URLs.
Google doesn’t have enough time to update its indexation all the time. However, they try to make sure that the process is completed timely. There could be a possibility that sometimes your content isn’t showing up due to the unavailability of indexation issues. You need to be patient, as your website indexed soon.
10- Rectify Issues That Lead to Penalization
Google has stated several times that penalties are the one that follows you throughout. It can haunt you as a ghost all the time. There might be a case where you have had a penalty before, and it hasn’t been rectified yet. The search engine giant (Google) won’t index your site or web pages. If your site is penalized by Google, then they can again do this because the penalties follow you around like an invited friend who drags their dirty shoes on your carpet. You might be thinking that excluding information from your site, which becomes the reason behind penalization, won’t help in any regard. You need to work in a way that the search engine expects from you. There are cases where people think that just slapping old content on a new site will work for them. Honestly, things don’t work like that.
For example, you are penalized by Google; then the safest route is to clean up your act entirely. You need to build the domain from scratch with new and fresh content. You need to do a complete fresh overhaul of content.
Final Words
Content and technical SEO are equally important. You also need to optimize your site in the best way possible. Along with that, there is a need to ensure that your technical SEO is up to par so that Google can crawl, index, and rank your site.
With this analysis, you would have to work on different aspects to get the website indexed. The chore is certainly laborious and requires consistent efforts and investment of resources. You need to stay at the top of the industry by keeping learning new and advanced things. In the domain of search engine optimization, things change at a rapid pace. You can conduct detailed research on why Google not indexing all pages and combine your research with the techniques elaborated in this blog.
Furthermore, also make sure to update your site on a regular basis. It can be carried out by posting new ones and updating old ones as well. As a result, Google keeps coming back to your posts and indexing them accordingly.