Reasons why your site may not be indexed
8 minute(s) read
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Published on: Jan 27, 2021
Updated on: Dec 14, 2021
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To increase the website ranking, initially, the site must be indexed by a search engine. If a website contains valuable content but cannot be analyzed by a search engine, it will not receive any visits because it is not displayed on the search engine results page.
After realizing that your website pages are not indexed yet, you should look for why Google is not indexing your website, then find the solution and solve all problems to get high traffic to your site. In this article, we try to find out the reasons for this problem, but first, we need to know what it means for a website to be indexed?
Index means to record and list the information. When you upload content on the website, Google begins to analyze the website and content by its crawlers; if you follow all rules and principles considered by Google, the new content of the website will be displayed in search results.
If Google rules are not followed on the site, the content will not be indexed by Google and shown in search results.
Simply put, the indexing process includes: analyzing the pages of a website by Google bots and storing all of their important information in the main Google database, to be presented to users while searching for keywords related to that page.
How to find out if your website is indexed or not?
1- Use the website map:
You can check the sitemap in the Google Search Console. It will provide you with other useful information, such as how many pages in your XML sitemap have been submitted to Google and how many have been indexed.
2- Check the Index Coverage report:
Another way to find out if a site's content is indexed or not is to check the Index Coverage report in the Google Search Console section.
This section provides you with all the information in the form of graphs, information such as how many pages of your website have been indexed, and also shows you how many URLs have been removed.
Get help from "site: domain.com":
By entering your domain name, you can get the maximum number of URLs indexed for this domain in Google.
4- Use the "site: domain inurl: ":
This way, you will know if Google search engine has indexed the specific page you are looking for or not.
5- Use the "site: domain filetype: ":
You can use "site: domain filetype: " to see if Google has indexed a page with a specific file type for you.
Now, it is time to get to the main part of the article.
The reasons why a site is not-indexed by Google?
There are various reasons why your website or parts of its content may not be indexed, which we will discuss in this regard.
1- The site is newly established and has not been yet:
When a site is new, Google does not index it quickly, and depending on the circumstances; it takes time for the Google search engine to index the website by receiving signals and links.
One of the factors that speed up the indexing process for newly established websites by Google is the use of links that attract Google's attention. As a result, Google will index the website as quickly as possible.
2- Existence of noindex in a meta tag:
One of the main reasons why a website is not indexed is the presence of Noindex in the meta tag. You can open the page which is not indexed and use the Ctrl + U keys, then look for codes such as the following:
Noindex, follow
Noindex, nofollow
Noindex, follow, noodp
Noinde, nofollow, noodp
Noindex
After viewing these types of codes, change the noindex code to index.
3- You do not have a suitable sitemap:
In fact, sitemap is a file that contains information about the content of pages, photos and the relationship between them, and other important information about the site, which all search engines such as Google use this file to examine the website with more ability and awareness.
One of the solutions that can help you solve this problem is to review and analyze the sitemap, and if you see a problem in it, fix it quickly and resubmit the sitemap.
4- Lack of links on the site:
As we mentioned, the sitemap is very important in indexing, and the Google search engine searches the sitemap to find internal or external links. If it does not find links related to your content, it will not index your site.
To be indexed more quickly by the Google search engine, your website must have valid internal and external links with high quality to be noticed by search engines as much as possible.
5- Blocked via Robots.txt:
Another factor that may have prevented your site from being indexed is that your site may be blocked because of using the Robots.txt file; in this case, you shouldn't be worried at all because you can easily delete the robots.txt file by solving this problem by deleting or editing that part, Google will index your website.
6- The website is not-indexed due to incorrect codes:
Coding is an important factor, and if it is not done properly, 404 errors are displayed on the website; this will prevent the Google search-engine from indexing your website.
To check if the Google crawler can read your website pages correctly, go to the new Google Console search's coverage section and check the "Submitted URL has crawl issue" at the bottom of the page to see whether you have this kind of error or not.
7- Existence of duplicate internal content:
Duplicate content on the website is one of the reasons why Google search engines may not index your website.
Maybe you are wondering how to find out if there is duplicate content on the website? To check if there is duplicate internal content on your website, we recommend using the Siteliner tool to search within your site. This tool shows you the report of all pages with internal duplicate content; in addition, this tool provides you with a report of the number of duplicate contents of your website so that you can take steps to solve this problem as soon as possible.
You can also check your site for the problem of duplicate content with the SEO platform Sitechecker. Duplicate Content Checker tool is one of the features of this platform. This tool will help you identify all duplicate content within your site and provide a detailed list of tips to fix this problem.
8- Existence of duplicate external content:
One of the important reasons is content copied from other websites. If it is realized by Google, it will not index the website at all and consider it a poor quality one.
One way to find out whether your website contains duplicate external content or not is to use Copyscape, which will give you a complete report.
9- There is an error in the WordPress .htaccess file:
The .htaccess file is the one that manages the server to perform various tasks on your WordPress website, which containing errors in this section prevents the website from being indexed by Google. Solving the problems of this part needs specialized experts that you should get help from them.
10- Low loading speed of the pages:
Use Google's Page Speed Insights tool to check page load time because Google will not index the website if it takes a long time to load.
In this case, the website may be indexed, but over time the ranking will decrease, and the page may even be removed from the search engine results page.
11- Low quality of a website:
Google algorithms are regularly updating and analyzing various factors and sending signals to Google about the quality of a site; then google decides whether to index the website or not, so one of the necessary factors of a website is to have a high quality.
For example, websites that have no purpose other than advertising and contain invaluable information are considered poor quality ones and will not be indexed.
Last words:
You know that the purpose of creating a website is to achieve success and get a high ranking on the search engine results page, which. Its initial requirement is to be indexed by google, which may increase the website ranking and lead to success. It is very important for a website designer to know why the website is not indexed. In this article, we mentioned several reasons which by checking each of them, the problem can be solved, and finally, organic traffic will be increased.
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