Indexing your page by Google is a great way to strengthen your SEO practices and get organic traffic to your website. Google Search Console shows which pages on your website have not been indexed and what specific issues have prevented that, including server errors and 404s. Overall, the more pages on your site get indexed, the more chances you have of showing up in search results.
Tomek Rudzki, the writer behind the seminal “Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO”, has conducted personal research and gathered the data for the most popular indexing issues. His research method includes creating sample pages, using anonymous data from his clients and other SEO professionals, and excluding non-indexable pages. Read the article to find out if you’ve experienced any of these issues and if yes, start strategizing on how to fix them.
The first identified issue is quality, which includes pages being thin in content, misinforming, or biased. The content on your page should be unique and valuable so that Google has a reason to show it to users.
Google can recognize duplicate content, even if you didn’t have the intention to do it. A common issue is canonical tags pointing to different pages, and as a result, the original page is not getting indexed. To prevent your pages from competing against each other for views, clicks, and links, use the canonical tag attribute or a 301 redirect.
There is also the issue of a crawl budget. Based on a few factors, Google’s crawlers will only crawl a certain amount of URLs on each site, so make sure not to let it waste time on pages you don’t care about.
The following identified issue is a soft 404 error, which means you have submitted a page that no longer exists for indexing. The error displays “not found” information, but it doesn’t return the HTTP 404 status code to the server. 404 errors could also show up because of too many redirects, so it is vital to shorten redirect chains as much as possible.
Finally, there are many crawl issues, but one of the main ones is a “robots.txt” problem. If Google’s crawler finds a “robots.txt” but can’t access it, it won’t crawl your site at all.
That’s a lot of potential issues to be considerate of! Did you know that we have proven experts of Full Funnel SEO and can create successful, robust strategies to connect your business objectives with your content? Schedule a FREE call with us today, and let’s get your website traffic growing.
