5 Top Reasons Why Google Isn’t Indexing Your Site

May 13, 2022

Are you wondering why your website isn’t showing up in search results? Even after spending your time and efforts doing everything right on your website design and development, it can be frustrating when you don’t see any traffic or rankings. Well, it could be possible that Google isn’t indexing your site.

Given that you are here checking for Google indexing issues, it won’t be news to you. So let’s get down to business.

This blog post lists the common issues that may prevent Google from indexing your web pages and how to address them. But before that, let’s make sure we are clear on what Google indexing is.

Indexing is a crucial part of how Google search works. First, the search engine discovers new web pages with web crawlers (spiders) through a process called crawling, and then they add those pages to the Google index. In layman’s terms, indexing is about adding a website and its pages to Google’s vast database so that your webpages appear in search results.

When you browse online for something, you are asking Google to return all the relevant information from their index. Since there are millions of pages that fit the search query, Google’s ranking algorithm does its best to sort the pages to provide you with the best and most relevant results in the search results. So, your website has to be indexed first, and it is only then that it will be ranked on Google search result pages.

So, Why Isn’t Google Indexing your website?

Lets take a look at the most common issues and how to solve them.

Your Site Has Minimal or Low-Quality Content

Google wants to provide users with accurate and up-to-date search results. So, if your website has minimal content and that too which is scraped or keyword stuffed, it would hurt the chances of Google indexing your webpages.

Make sure the content on your website is good, accurate and informative. The content layout should be designed with users in mind; it should answer user queries and provide information with relevant keywords. Moreover, you need to present it with a unique perspective different from your competitor sites.

If your webpage content fails to meet those content quality standards, Google is more likely to index another website with better quality content than yours.

Your Website Loads Slowly

A slow website is less likely to be featured in Google index results. If your site’s loading time is poor and requests frequently time out, the Google bots can’t crawl the pages. Moreover, the search engine would consider it a poor user experience and may choose not to index the page.

You can use Google Page Speed Insights to check the page speed score of your website. This tool provides detailed insight into your website’s areas or sections that need improvement. Google Page Speed Insights analyzes your web pages against various performance factors and guide you in making your website faster.

There are multiple factors that contribute to your site’s loading time. It could be the problems with your hosting service or the website structure itself. If you detect issues with the infrastructure or web stack, it would be better to host your website on a high-performance server. On the other hand, if the problems stem from your website structure, you need to consider optimizing images, cleaning up the database, using a content delivery network, streamlining codes, and more.

Your Website has Plugins that Block Search Engines from Crawling Your Site

Most websites have a robots.txt file that instructs web crawlers which webpages they can and cannot access. Search engine bots can’t crawl the URLs blocked in the robots.txt file, preventing Google from indexing your webpage.

When you create and set up a robots.txt file, make sure it doesn’t have the following lines of instructions:

Disallow: /

User-agent: *

User-agent: Googlebot

The Disallow tag in the robots.txt file is responsible for blocking your Google crawler from accessing the pages of your site. Make sure to remove the “Disallow” directive for any important content or pages that you want to show up in Google.

Your Website’s Meta Tags are Set to Noindex

Sometimes, the reason why Google isn’t indexing your website is as simple as a line of code with meta tags. If you have discouraged the search engines from indexing your pages with a “noindex” directive, it would stand to reason that your page is neither indexed nor showing up on Google results.

The solution to this Google indexing issue is simple. You just need to remove the directives “noindex” and “nofollow” from any pages that shouldn’t have them. Once you change your site permissions to allow search engine visibility and remove “noindex” tags, Google will be able to crawl and index your website.

You’re Not Using A Sitemap

A sitemap is a textually organized model of a website’s content – and it helps Google crawl and index your website. This blueprint contains detailed information about all pages on your website, when they were updated, what they contain and more. So, if your website is missing a sitemap, then Google cant crawl and index all your pages efficiently.

However, it is important to note that Google Search Console prefers XML sitemaps over HTML sitemaps as they are specifically geared towards search engine performance. After creating the sitemap, you can either manually submit it to Google through Search Console or include it in your robots.txt file.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Identifying Google indexing issues is a challenge, but it is worth solving for long-term growth and rankings. You need to work on different aspects of your website to get it indexed so that it ranks higher in search engine results.

If you are having trouble indexing your website or driving up your rankings, get in touch with Aiwa Digital. Backed by a dedicated team of SEO professionals, we ensure to offer the right guidance and expertise to help you build an optimized web presence.