How to Get Google to Index Your Website,

Google Search Console and Indexing.

It is always a great feeling when your website first gets discovered and indexed by Google. And even after all these years it still brings its own little thrill to know you have been found by Google. Yet after a while, you might realize that Google has stopped indexing your website and you don’t know why. 

Therefore, if Google has stopped indexing your website, you must quickly ascertain the cause. This article discusses potential problems that could stop Google from indexing your web pages.

We have the knowledge to assist you in sorting things out, whether you want to know what to do if your website is not mobile-friendly or you need to submit a site map or even more complicated indexing issues.

Learn how to resolve these common issues so Google can resume indexing your pages.

Sign Up for Google Search Console.

Sign up for Google Search Console if you haven’t already. It’s a free tool that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s performance in Google search results. Click below to go to the Google Search Console.

You can sign up straight away and start using the Google Search Console to help you find any problems and fix the issues that need fixing and are stopping your posts from being indexed.

A Selection of Problems.

Here are The Bots. 

• Amazonbot is the Amazon web crawler.
• Bingbot is Microsoft’s search engine crawler for Bing.
• DuckDuckBot is the crawler for the search engine DuckDuckGo.
• Googlebot is the crawler for Google’s search engine.
• Yahoo Slurp is the crawler for Yahoo’s search engine.
• Yandex Bot is the crawler for the Yandex search engine.

How Does “Google-Search” Find and See Your “Posts”?

Google uses a “Bot” or “Crawlers” to search the web for new web pages that provide information to people looking for specific topics.

 Thus, the computer software known as a web crawler, crawler, or web spider is used to search website content and other information on the internet automatically. The most typical purpose of these software programs, or bots, is to add information to a search engine’s list.

Remembering of course that “Google’s” main job is to provide a list of websites for the person looking for specific information about a topic.

Crawlers visit websites methodically to discover each page’s content so that it can be archived, updated, and retrieved in response to a user’s search query.

Reasons Why Google Isn’t  Indexing Your Site.

1. Your Website is Not Mobile Friendly.

Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is essential and not a difficult task to fix. And the reason it is essential is that Google introduced “mobile-first indexing” which means the information shown on a mobile or tablet should be the same as can be found on a desktop computer. However, it could be as simple as something that happened to me which was the text was too small to read easily on a smartphone. Or you could have poor linking or linking too closely together

 The first thing I would recommend is to test it with Googles mobile friendly test.  

Quite often the problems are design problems and adding things like CSS media Queries will help by providing this type of result.  

Media queries can be used to check many things, such as:

• width and height of the viewport
• width and height of the device
• orientation (is the tablet/phone in landscape or portrait mode?)
• resolution

2. Slow Loading Sites.

There are various reasons why your website can take a long time to load.
It may also be the case that your page contains more content than a user’s browser can handle or that you’re utilizing an outdated server with insufficient resources.

Start by using Page speed Insights to see how fast or slow your website is and how you can improve the speed.

The advice given on this page will help you make your site faster and help you not have problems with indexing. Also, your site speed time is a ranking factor (The faster your site the higher your rank) so taking the time to fix your site speed can drastically improve your website rankings. That is you will be closer to number one in search engine queries. 

3. PoorContent.

If there is one thing that will kill your readership and stop Google from indexing your posts it is poor content. I have done many posts on how to put together good content for your website and this link will take you to one of them. 

“Tips to Writing Good Website Content”

This explains how most people, 97%, do not like the user experience of visiting most websites. And it comes down to shoddy practices on behalf of the website owner. One of our greatest challenges is to provide good content in a timely manner. And it is the word “Time” that stops us from providing that service properly. We are all stretched for time and we can take shortcuts that eventually shoot us in the foot. I know this as a fact because I have been guilty of this as well. But we are doing nobody service if we continue to act in this way.

Also with chatGPT and other AI services, I believe this may get worse before it gets better. There are now a lot of people churning out “lackluster” content that is exactly the same as what is written elsewhere.

As I said in the above post, good content plays a massive role in the success of your website and you should not go in half-arsed. Please take the time to read my post on “writing good website content” as it will be time well worth spending.

4. Poor User Experience.

A user-friendly and interesting website is essential for effective SEO. If it’s simple for visitors to locate what they’re looking for and navigate the website without feeling frustrated or “peeved”, Google will rank your site higher in its search results.

Google doesn’t want users spending too much time on a page that either takes a very long time to load, has a difficult-to-understand navigation system, or is just difficult to use due to the abundance of distractions.

Do your readers like what they see and are they sharing the posts you write, are you impressing your readers? And are you linking back to other content on your website to help people fully understand what you are talking about?

Another one I used to be guilty of was if you are doing a product comparison, are you giving enough options for your readers to choose from? Are all your purchasing links working and have you gone back and checked some of your older links to see if they still work? If not, that may be another reason Google has stopped indexing your site.

5. Are Plug-Ins Blocking Google From Crawling Your Site?  

A robots.txt plugin is one example of such a plugin. A Googlebot won’t be able to crawl your site if you no-index it in your robots.txt file when using this plugin.

Create a robots.txt file and take the following actions:

Set this to “public” when you build it to allow unrestricted access for crawlers.

Here is an example provided by WordPress that resulted in non-indexing from Google.

You can find out more about no-indexing with this link at Google Search Central.

6. Broken or Duplicated Content.

If you delete or move a page on your website you will get a “404” warning like the one below. This is not good.

If you do this and do not put a re-direct in place it will create a poor customer experience and possibly stop Google indexing your website.

So you need to direct traffic from one URL to another when the previous URL is no longer active. These are called redirects and they are crucial.

By putting in a re-direct you will prevent users from arriving on outdated or duplicate pages which will enhance the overall user experience.

Redirects can prevent you from losing search engine rankings and from having unhappy users. Google Search Console doesn’t always provide status codes like 404s. You can discover the status codes for 404s and other issues by using an external crawler like Screaming Frog.

After using “Screaming Frog” you can go back to Google Search Console and get them to crawl the site once more and re-submit it for indexing. Wait about a week before contacting Google again to see if that has fixed the problem. It should have.

7. MetaTags are set to No Follow or No Index.

No-index and no-follow meta tags are sometimes used before the no-index, and the no-follow setting was properly configured in the backend of your website, a link or page on your site may have been indexed by Google’s crawler and later removed. 

Due to this, it’s possible that the page hasn’t been re-indexed, and if you’re using a plugin to prevent Google from crawling your website, it’s possible that the page will never be indexed at all. 

Any meta tags with the words no-index, no-follow on them should be changed to read index, follow as a simple solution.

If you have thousands of pages like this you might want to employ someone to do it for you, otherwise it’s head down and bottom up.

More than anything else, this could be just bad luck.

8. You Haven’t Fixed Your Google Penalty.

Google won’t index your site if you’ve received a penalty in the past and haven’t fixed it. These can be problematic and will stick to your content even if you move it to another site.

The solution to this is simple:

The best course of action in case you are punished is to completely clean up your previous post or posts. You must create entirely new material, possibly redesign the domain from the ground up, or completely revamp the content. Google explains that they anticipate it will take you the same amount of time to get out of a penalty as it did to enter one. This is one problem where you may wish to get the help of a professional. There are many at “Fiverr” who can help. Click on the “Fiverr” link to find a few very helpful people. 

Fiverr business.

Removing your content from your original site and locating it on a new site will not work, you need to fix the problem not move it.

9. Poor Technical SEO.

You’ve probably heard a hundred times or more how important search engine optimization (SEO) is for digital marketing. But do you actually comprehend how SEO functions? Even if you have a general understanding of what this complex and extensive process entails, you might not fully understand it.

Understanding the many components of SEO and how they interact is essential to understanding why SEO is so important.

Simply said, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, which attracts more visitors and gives you the chance to convert them into paying clients.

Additionally, it’s a great way to build relationships with prospects, increase brand recognition, and position yourself as a knowledgeable authority in your industry.

You can delve in deeper by looking at a past post “What is SEO and why is it important“

Technical SEO is the process of making your website and server more crawlable, indexable, and rankable for search engines. By correcting issues like broken links, inadequate mobile optimization, and duplicate content, technical SEO can also enhance your user experience and content quality. Enhancing your website’s titles and metadata, which search engines analyze to understand what your website is about, can also be helpful.

Content is King, but by covering your bases with the proper use of SEO you will make it easier for readers and search engines. Keywords, Meta tags, Anchor texts, and link building as explained in my SEO post and if you follow the advice and fixes it will keep Google happy. 

10. No Site Map or Up To Date Site Map.

The best course of action is to submit a sitemap if you wish to ask Google to index more pages than the URL inspection quota or to index your entire website. A sitemap is essentially an XML document that tells Google, “Here’s a list of all the pages on my site, please have a look,” and eventually, Google will comply. It can take them a few days to a few weeks to get around to it.

Although XML is by far the best, Google supports Text, Atom, RSS, and other sitemap formats. It is the easiest to create, has the most data, and is frequently created automatically by CMSs.

With a Yoast SEO plug-in for your WordPress site, you will be able to generate an XML site map automatically.

11. Use a Third Party Ping Service

Using a third-party ping provider is an additional means of attracting Google’s notice. To obtain your content indexed by these sites, a service like Ping-O-Matic, for instance, employs the ping method from a number of different services (like Feed Burner or Superfeedr). The existing indexation and “strength” of these services means that they can pick up your material as a result of indexation.

12. Use Social Media.

If your content is often posted and shared on social media, Google is more likely to index it.

Google is particularly interested in Twitter and Facebook. And during the past few years, Google has been using a website named “Keen” as a substitute for Pinterest.

They crawl and index as many sites as possible, so regular social media posting will boost your chances of being found by Google.

13. Javascript Problems.

Compared to simple HTML, JavaScript-only content may take longer to index. When working with dynamic websites, there are a number of difficulties and obstacles with JavaScript SEO that you should take into account. These problems will have various effects on your website and harm its SEO.

Files blocked by Robot.txt

Resources being restricted by the robot.txt file is one of the most frequent and straightforward problems with JavaScript.
Many web designers and inexperienced SEOs seek to prevent crawlers from viewing anything other than content. After all, there is no need to spend a crawl budget retrieving resources that have little SEO value if all of your material is in the HTML file. Or so one might think.

But as we already know, Google makes use of these sources to produce an image of your page. That comprises the JS file to render dynamic material as well as your CSS to comprehend the page layout.

Search engines won’t provide a correct picture of your page without these two files (and other resources like images) restricted, leading to indexing problems like missing material, poor ranks, or errors.

Google is Making Use of Old Files

when Google Bot downloads the program files required to display your webpage. To lessen the load on the system when it crawls the website again, it will cache them. Because of this caching method, Google may disregard modifications you make to your CSS, JS, or other files’ names and contents and use the cached versions in their place.

Assume the modifications are substantial enough (for example, by changing element names or actions). Because the page won’t be presented as intended in that scenario, it will not be indexed by search engines or will look to be broken.

Google Doesn’t Render or Only Renders Some of Your Pages

The renderer won’t always be able to acquire all the content on your page, even if Google downloads all your files and has access to all the resources it requires.

Google’s renderer takes time to work, despite the fact that there are numerous causes for this. Once the allotted crawl budget is used up, Google will time out when rendering your sites, stopping the rendering operation.

It will repeat the procedure in a fresh crawl session, and if it is still unable to render the entire page, it will index your page regardless of whether it contains all of the content.

14. Duplicate Content.

Duplicate content is when a piece of information appears on many pages of your own website or on another website outside of it.

In a broad sense, duplicate content is any material that offers your visitors little to no value. Pages with little or no body content are therefore also regarded as having duplicate content.
It can be challenging for search engines to choose which version of content to index and display in their search results when there are multiple versions of the content available. Due to the competition between the copies of the content, this reduces performance for all of them.
When other websites link to multiple versions of the same piece of material, search engines will have a difficult time combining link metrics (authority, relevancy, and trust) for that content.

Be Patient.

Google is Google and bows to no one. it will index your site when good and ready.It will take time to climb the search engine rankings on Google. To enhance the volume of organic traffic to your website, you must closely monitor your SEO.

The quality of the site and its level of internet popularity are the two factors that have the biggest impact on how quickly a site is indexed. Try to run some social media promotions after you’ve made sure your material is of the greatest caliber possible to encourage people to start talking about your website.

Increasing a site’s popularity and online visibility makes it more likely that Google will prioritize its indexing. Including internal links and backlinks will also improve your SEO and rankings. You can find out more about backlinks here at …

“Do You Need Backlinks For Your Blog?” 

And the more you blog, the faster Google will get to your site content for indexing.

Author; Stephen.

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