Main Reasons and Top Solutions to Google Website Indexing Issues

Content:

1. How To Find Out Why Your Website Is Not on Google
2. Top 3 Reasons Why Google Won't Index Your Website or Web Page
3. How Can You Get Your Page Indexed by Google
4. How To Check Your Page Indexation with Netpeak Checker
5. Bottom Lines

There might be a moment when you'll wonder, "Why is my Google search not working?" or "Why won't Google index my website (or a web page)?". There may be plenty of issues with page indexing. In this article, we'll share the main reasons for that and recommend the best solutions to such problems.

How To Find Out Why Your Website Is Not on Google

Before diving into troubleshooting, you need to understand why your website or a particular page is not available for bots to index. You can check your website's status by trying one of the following options:

• Google Search Console (GSC) — this is a free multi-functional service that compiles useful reports about your website's on-page metrics, organic traffic flows, and other parameters.
• "Site:" command checkup — this one helps you track web page indexation via Google search. To do so, type "site:yourdomain.com" into the search bar and replace "yourdomain.com" with a target website’s URL.
• Website crawling tools — these can be both online services and third-party apps that help you run in-depth website checkups and see if it is facing any kind of issues, including the ones related to Google website indexing.

Top 3 Reasons Why Google Won't Index Your Website or Web Page

Now that you know how to detect unindexed pages, let's look at the main reasons that cause Google site indexing issues.

Google can't discover your page

If that's the case, it probably means Google can't find the page on your website. When a search engine can't detect a page, it can't index it — hence, this page won't appear in search results. But why might Google struggle to find it? Here are the main reasons:

• Your website lacks internal linking. Internal links help Googlebots navigate your site and define its structure. If a website doesn't have enough internal links, discovering all of its pages becomes difficult. That's why Google may not index all of your pages.
• You don't have this page in a sitemap. Not having a page in the sitemap makes it harder to discover and crawl it. This page may also be considered less important or lower in the hierarchy. If you add a page to the sitemap, the search engines will likely discover the page, giving bots a hint that Google should index this page.
• Your website's too large. Googlebots have a limited amount of time to crawl a website. When it's large and slow to load, crawling it becomes a challenge for the bots. Eventually, they may fail to index all pages within the given time, causing issues for your website.

Unsuccessful page crawling

When bots crawl a website, they find new pages and content to add to Google’s index. This helps make all the target pages visible in the search results. However, if the bots fail to crawl a page, it will result in Google site indexing issues.

Here are the main reasons for that:

• Low crawl budget. This is the number of URLs bots will crawl and index within the given time. If it's too low, the search engine’s bots won’t crawl and index all the pages instantly, meaning some of these pages may not appear in search results. The main problems that can affect your crawl budget are: too many low-quality pages, too many URLs with non-200 status codes or non-canonical URLs, slow server and page speed.
• Server errors. When a bot crawls a page, it requests the hosting server to retrieve its content. If there's a problem with that, it responds with an error code and doesn’t provide the content. Googlebots understand this as an issue with the website, which slows down the crawling process. Eventually, the search engine may not index some of your pages. Furthermore, if this happens repeatedly, it might lead to pages being dropped from the index.
• Your page is disallowed in robots.txt. If you have a page disallowed in the robots.txt file, search engine bots can't crawl and/or index it. However, there are exceptions. For example, if your page is disallowed in robots.txt, Googlebots don’t crawl it, but if that page did get indexed before, it would still remain indexed.

Google didn’t approve indexing your page or deindexed it

If Google doesn’t approve page/blog indexing or deindexes a previously indexed page, it won’t appear in the search results. The following reasons can cause it:

• Your page has a noindex meta tag. If there's a noindex meta tag on a particular page, it means Google is instructed not to index the page.
• Your page has a canonical tag pointing to a different page. A canonical tag on a page tells a search engine to consider the canonical URL a preferred one for that page’s content. This tag also shows up when one page is a duplicate of another one. Wrong usage of a canonical tag can cause Google to not index pages.
• The quality of your page is too low. If the content on the page is low-quality, Google may not consider it valuable or essential to users. Moreover, such content can cause high bounce rates, which can tell Google the page is irrelevant, making the search engine not index it.
• Your page has an HTTP status other than 200 (OK). The 200 OK HTTP status code means the server has successfully responded to a given request, and the page is accessible for indexing and browsing. If a page returns a status code other than 200 OK, it won’t get indexed by Google.
• Your page is in the indexing queue. This means Google is going to index the page. This can be a lengthy process, especially if you have a new, low-traffic website, and it can even experience more delays if there are any technical issues with a website, you have a low crawl budget, etc.

How Can You Get Your Page Indexed by Google

If you have a brand-new website, fully indexing it may take some time. The first thing you can do is wait and monitor the process via tools like Google Search Console, as it's free and completely transparent.

If that doesn’t help and you're experiencing ongoing indexing issues, try these tips:

1. Start by detecting the main cause of the problem by checking out the possible factors listed above in this article.
2. Once you identify the cause, fix these issues as quickly as possible.
3. Submit the page in Google Search Console once again and wait for approval.
4. If Google indexing issues don't go away, consider getting assistance from a professional technical SEO agency.

How To Check Your Page Indexation with Netpeak Checker

One of the most helpful SEO analytical tools out there is Netpeak Checker. It enables data extraction from over 25 different SEO services. You can retrieve indexation data from Semrush, Ahrefs, and many other tools. Moreover, it provides you with detailed reports and an interactive dashboard where you can keep track of your SEO efforts and detect the problematic spots on your website.

If you need to check whether your site's experiencing any indexation issues with Netpeak Checker, all you have to do is add all the necessary pages in the app's search bar, enable the "Indexation" parameter for required search engines (Google, Bing, or Yahoo), and press the "Start" button to run the analysis.

Our tool checks page indexation using the [info: URL] operator for Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The values of this parameter you can find in the results table are:

• TRUE, meaning the URL is indexed
• FALSE, which means the URL is not available for bots to index

A captcha check may show up during the analysis due to multiple requests to a search engine from your IP address. To avoid this restriction, try using a captcha-solving service and/or a list of proxies.

Also, remember the "Indexed URLs" parameter, which shows you the number of pages indexed by a certain search engine. You can check it by using [site:] for Yahoo and Bing.

Bottom Line

Google indexing site is a vital process for any page that you want to appear in search results and rank high in Google or other target search engines. Failure to index your entire site or its particular pages will result in significant organic traffic losses and other serious issues with your website.

If you want to succeed in Google indexing your page, try to detect the possible issues that prevent the search engine from doing so. You can also get help from Netpeak Checker to detect which pages can't get indexed and why. Get your website back on track and improve your online performance today!