Google has warned for years that every site needs great, valued natural content with quality backlinks. If Google determines your website lacks quality content, then it may not index your webpages. Pages that aren’t indexed won’t appear in search results. There is no quick fix to rank critical pages. We do, however, have specific solutions to help improve your site and indexing.

Algorithm Updates Affect Indexing

Google has often adjusted how frequently and thoroughly their search bots crawl sites’ content. This analysis is mostly determined by the overall value of the entire website, compared to those of the competition. Google may slow down how it is indexing your site after it calculates your site’s value compared to the rest of the web and your competitors.

Line graph showing daily web search clicks from 10/25/21 to 1/2/22, with fluctuating values around 250-450 clicks. Total clicks are 26,914.

What Factors Can Affect Indexing?

“It’s really hard to call a site authoritative after 30 articles, and especially if you’ve stopped publishing for a while, I can see how Google might be a bit more conservative with regards to indexing more.”” – John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google

  • Small Sites of Less than 30 pages
  • Interruption in Blogging / Posting
  • Content under 500 words for subpages or 1,000 words for main pages
  • Generic content that doesn’t directly support the page topic
  • Long URL Issues
  • Coverage Issues in Google
  • Page Experience Issues / Core Web Vitals
  • Lack of Domain Authority and Backlink Profiles
  • Lack of Social Media and Inbound Links
  • Poor User Experience
  • Slow Site

How to Promote Full Site Indexing

  • Regular Publishing – Regularly publish core new high-quality content to your site.
  • Unique Content – Publish authoritative, unique content that is read and shared.
  • Authoritative Website – Secure a backlink profile with a focus on quality. This can be but is not limited to guest posting, legal directories, and other link-building tactics.
  • Fast & Secure – Ensure your site is quick to load and maintains a 70+ score through Google PageSpeed Insights

What about Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Other Search Engines?

The indexing issues typically do not affect other search engines. Further, Bing uses an IndexNow protocol which allows websites to be indexed quicker. Google has not yet implemented this (even though we can still request the indexing of a page in Google Search Console).

Instructions and example URL format for submitting a URL to a search engine using an HTTP request.

Google Crawl Budget

Google does have a crawl budget, but unless your site has more than 100,000 pages, this should not be an issue.

A line graph displaying crawl requests from 10/27/21 to 1/12/22, with a total of 46.9K requests. It also shows a total download size of 669M bytes and an average response time of 458 milliseconds.

A screenshot of the 'Submitted sitemaps' section in a Google Search Console panel displaying four sitemaps listed with details on type, dates submitted and read, status, and discovered URLs.

Common Error or Excluded Coverage Issues

There are five common issues for indexing.

  1. Crawled – currently not indexed (Quality issue)
  2. Duplicate content – (Site architecture issue)
  3. Discovered – currently not indexed (Crawl budget/quality issue)
  4. Soft 404 – (Site architecture issue)
  5. Crawl issue – (Crawl budget/technical issue)

Screenshot of a Google Search Console report showing validation statuses: two errors (Redirect error and Submitted URL not found - 404) and three excluded items (Page with redirect, Excluded by 'noindex' tag, Crawled but not indexed).

Here is a full list too of more issues with Google Indexing:

  • Error
    • Redirect Error
    • Submitted URL Not Found
  • Excluded
    • Crawled – Not Currently Indexed (Quality Issue)
    • Discovered – Currently Not Indexed
    • Page with Redirect
    • Excluded by’NoIndex’ Tag
    • Not Found (404)
    • Alternate Page with proper Canonical Tag
    • Duplicate without user-selected canonical
    • Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical
    • Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
    • Blocked due to other 4xx issue
  • Sitemap
    • Status indicated not indexed or error

How Can I Check if My Site is Indexed?

Easy, just visit Google and type in the web address for: yourcooldomain.com. This will tell you which pages are indexed in total on your website. You can also visit Google and search site:yourcooldomain.com/example-page/ to see if a specific page is indexed in Google.

Search engine results page for the query "site:www.paperstreet.com". The page displays a Google promotion and a result for Paperstreet, a company specializing in law firm website design, SEO, and internet marketing.

You can type in specific pages too to see if they are indexed, such as:

https://www.paperstreet.com/portfolio/law-firm/

If the search returns a result, then you are indexed. If not, you will want to login to your Google Search Console to make sure your sitemap is uploaded and see any errors / exclusions.

How PaperStreet Can Help

Our team will conduct a comprehensive review and establish which factors need improvement. Items we can assist with include:

Budget & Pricing

Please contact us for a detailed quote. Every website is unique and may require different solutions to achieve full indexing.

Final Note about Google Indexing

Getting your site indexed may take days, weeks, or months now. These timeframes are dictated by Google and other search engines. That said, the more you can establish the quality and authority of your site, the better your results will be. The best way to do that is to have interesting content, a diverse backlink profile, offer a better user experience, a fast website, a solid site architecture, and an in-depth social media experience.

The good news is that you don’t have to determine what your site is missing—PaperStreet is here to provide you with the solutions your website needs. Call us today to get started.

CONTACT TODAY – FREE SEO CONSULT 

Google Indexing by PaperStreet

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