Is Google not indexing your website? Then I would say you are in serious problem.
It means you are invisible on the internet and will not even show in the search queries, so you will not get organic traffic or anything. If you are here, then I think all these are new to you, and you do not know how to increase indexing.
You can learn everything about Google Indexing from here, and we are here to help you out!
Ways to Index Your Website
1. Delete the Crawl Blocks in the Robots.txt File
Are you facing a problem with indexing? Is Google not indexing your website? If that is the issue, then it can be because of the crawl block in the robots.txt file. You can check that issue by going to yourdomain.com/robots.txt. There you will find two snippets which are-
1. User-agent: Googlebot
2. Disallow: /
1. User-agent: *
2. Disallow: /
Both of these Googlebot will not be allowed to crawl the pages on the site. We can fix the issue by removing it.
You can check whether the crawl block was the culprit; you must paste the URL into the URL inspection tool. To reveal more details about the coverage block, you need to look for the 'crawl allowed? No: blocked by the robots.txt’ errors. This indicates that the page will be blocked.
2. Delete the Noindex Tags
Google will not index pages when you tell them not to do. It is helpful for you to keep some web pages private. There will be two different methods to do this-
Method 1- Meta Tag
If the page has any of these meta tags in <head> section, then that will not be indexed by Google-
<meta name= “robots” content= “noindex”>
<meta name= “googlebot” content = “noindex”>
These Meta robot tags will tell search engines whether they can index the page. You can run the crawl with the audit site to find all pages with the noindex Meta tag.
Method 2- X-Robots-Tag
Crawlers also respect the response header of X-robots-tag, which can be implemented with a server-side scripting language such as PHP in a .htaaccess file or change the server configuration.
This URL inspection tool in search consoles will tell whether the crawling page has blocked Google. You need to enter the URL and look for the ‘Indexing allowed? NO: 'noindex’ detected in X-robots-tag.
Also check: Site Loading Speed – How is It Useful for Optimizing a Website?
3. Add the Page in the Sitemap
A sitemap will tell Google which pages of our website are crucial and which are not. It gives us an idea about how they should be re-crawled. Google should find pages on the website; whether they are your sitemap, that is still good practice to include them.
We can check whether the page in the site map uses the URL inspection tool only if we see the URL is not on Google error or Sitemap as N/A, then it is not your sitemap or indexed.
4. Remove the Fake Canonical Tags
With the conical tag, Google gets to know about the preferable page, which will look like this-
<link rel= “canonical” href= “/page.html/”>
Some of the pages will have no canonical tag or conical tag, which explains to Google that the page is preferred and is the only version, and this needs to be indexed.
But if the page has a rogue canonical tag, then that will tell you about a preferred version that does not exist and that will also not get indexed. We can use the Google URL inspection tool to see an 'alternate page with canonical tag' warning when the canonical point to some other page. If that warning is not and you want a page index, then remove the canonical tag.
5. Ensure That the Page is not Orphaned
Orphan pages do not have internal links because Google explores the new content through crawling. They are unable to discover the orphan pages through the process, and website visitors will not be able to find them either.
We can check the orphan pages by checking the links report for the error: "Orphan page (has no incoming internal links). It will include all the pages available in the sitemap and those that are indexable but do not have internal links.
6. Edit No-follow Internal Links
Nofollow links are the links with the rel= “nofollow” tag. It prevents the transfer of the PageRank to its URL destination. Google does not crawl the nofollow links.
It is crucial to ensure that all the internal links to the indexable pages are followed. You can check the links reports for the crawled website for indexable pages that have 'Page has nofollow incoming internal links only’.
7. Add Robust Internal Links
Google does discover new content by crawling the website. If we ignore the internal links, then you may be able to find them. The only solution to the problem is adding some internal links to the page.
However, when you want Google to index, then that does make sense to do so, which makes it more powerful. It is because Google will re-crawl such pages faster than the less important pages. It will show all the ages on the website that the URL sorts. You can skim the list and look for the relevant pages that will add internal links.
8. Ensure You Have a Unique and Valuable Page
Google does not index low-quality pages because those pages do not hold any value to the users. If you have checked the John Mueller tweet, then you may know that he said if you want Google to index, then the web page or website needs to be remarkable.
If you do not know about the technical issue, that will be a lack of value. That is, it is better to review the page with a fresh eye and ensure it is valuable.
9. Delete the Low-quality Pages
If there are low-quality pages on my site, that will be a waste of the crawl budget. It is like grading a test paper. For instance, if I am a teacher and have to grade 10 test papers, it will take some time. But if I have to grade 100 papers, that will take more time.
Just like that, Google will tell you the crawl budget and will crawl efficiently. But you can remove the low-quality pages from the site, which will not be wrong. In fact, it will have a positive effect on the crawl budget.
10. Build Top-quality Backlinks
Backlinks are a crucial part of a webpage; if someone is linking that, then it should have some values, which are the pages that Google wants to index.
To get full transparency, Google does not index web pages with backlinks, but billions of indexed pages do not have backlinks, leading to faster indexing.
Wrapping Up!
Google is not indexing your website because of technical issues or low-quality pages, which are worthless. Any of these things can be possible, but I would say it is more because of technical issues.
One thing that you need to understand is that indexing is not ranking. But still, SEO is crucial to rank and attract the stream of organic traffic.
This post was proofread by Grammarly