Why is Google Not Indexing Your Pages? Common Indexing Issues for Programmatic SEO Sites and How to Solve Them
For your ideal audience to discover and consume your content, it has to be indexed by Google's bot. By the way, “Google indexing" is a fancy word that explains a process where Google adds your page to its database, before proceeding to list it in search results.
The issue is, indexation doesn’t happen as fast as we would want for programmatic SEO sites. And even when it does, some web pages are left out. Hence, most site owners ask, "Why is Google not indexing my pages?”
There are several reasons why this might happen, and this guide shows you why Google might not index all the pages on your Programmatic SEO site, plus what to do to correct it.
TL;DR
- Google might stop indexing your site if it doesn't abide by their webmaster guidelines, such as having too much thin content or using black-hat SEO tactics.
- If a page has been deleted or doesn't exist, it will return a 404 error, which may lead to the page getting unindexed.
- Google prioritizes high-quality, valuable content. If your site mainly hosts thin content, Google might not index your pages.
- Google might not index your site if it believes a crawl will overload your server. Check your site's average response time in the Google Search Console to avoid this.
- Meta tags such as "No-index" and "No-allow" could be preventing Google from crawling or indexing your pages.
- Exceeding your site's crawl budget (the number of pages Google bot is allowed to crawl daily) by publishing too many pages at once could lead to unindexed pages.
- Pages without any internal links are more difficult for search engines to discover and crawl.
- Pages with similar content can harm your page authority and confuse Google, leading to non-indexed pages.
How Long Does it Take Google to Index a Page?
Google hasn't given a straight answer to this, So no one knows for sure.
However, in one of Google's office hours on YouTube, search advocate John Mueller hints that it takes an average of one week for new pages.
And there's a belief among the SEO community that most web pages get indexed within a week of publication.
Does that mean something is off if your pages aren’t indexed after a week of publication?
Not at all.
Keep in mind that Google has said that they can’t index all the pages on a website. Tomek Rudzki, Head of Research at Onely, proved that right after his research revealed that “On average, 16% of valuable pages on popular websites aren’t indexed”.
The reason is that Google is trying to strike a balance between managing the crawl budget of a site and serving high-quality content on search results.
Because you’ve created a page does not mean search engine will index it, especially if it doesn’t follow their Search essentials (Formerly webmaster guidelines)
Why is Google not Indexing My Site? Eights Things You Could Be Doing Wrong!
If Google isn’t indexing some of your web pages 3-6 months after publication, there’s a high probability that you’re guilty of one of these:
You’re Hit With a Penalty
One of the reasons Google index might not happen in some of your pages is if you've been hit with a Google penalty. A penalty is a punishment Google serves to websites that violate their webmaster guidelines.
That violation could be anything from having too many thin content on your site or using black-hat SEO tactics that exploit the loopholes in their system.
When you get a penalty, Google removes the pages on your entire site from their database, de-ranks top ranking ones, and fails to index new ones.
Depending on the type of penalty you’re hit with, you will get a notification under the “security and manual action” tab of Google search console.
How to Fix This
Google penalty is a punishment Google issues to websites guilty of violating its webmaster guidelines. Most Google penalties are caused by manual actions.
Manual action is when a Google employee reviews your content and finds you guilty of issues like Duplicate content, spammy backlinks, keyword stuffing, etc.
Usually, a manual action notification message is followed by information on why the penalty is given and what should be done to lift it.
Once you get this message, ensure you fix the issue they complained about and submit a reconsideration request. This guide will walk you through the penalty removal process.
Your Page Returns a 404 Error on Google Search
A URL returns a 404 error if the page that exists on it has been deleted or doesn't exist anymore.
How does a 404 error impact SEO?
As earlier stated, Google is continuously crawling the web to discover highly valuable content it will serve its searchers.
Using that logic, we can conclude that a 404 error renders a page valueless. Hence, if the page was previously indexed and keeps returning a 404 error after six months, it gets un-indexed.
How to fix this
If you've moved or deleted a page, set up a 301 redirect to the new URL or another relevant page. This helps users find the updated content and prevents them from encountering 404 errors.
Your Site is a Dumping Ground for Thin Content
Some programmatic SEO sites adopts an “AI-only” approach to content creation, and fail to have a human review content before they’re published. Such content are usually thin in value, hence when Google fails to rank or index them, they tell themselves that "Google hates Ai content."
From our findings, Google has nothing against auto-generated content, provided it offers value to the reader. Come to think of it; Google has no Ai content detector.
It can't differentiate a human-written content from an Ai-written content.
The bitter truth: Google doesn’t hate your content because it’s auto-generated; rather, it hates your content because it isn’t helpful to readers.
How to fix this
So, how do you create Programmatic SEO content that’s helpful to humans?
Here’s what we recommend you do with your programmatic SEO content to ensure it’s of high quality:
- Don’t publish without having a human review it
- Manually add internal links to prevent orphan pages
- Run a duplicate check on each content
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Use sentence-type data (Read the guide above to understand what this means)
Connectivity or Server issues
Server error impacts page indexation in 2 ways:
- Page discovered but not indexed
- Page explored but not indexed
They both indicate that Google knows that the page exists but doesn't index it. What could be the cause?
This often happens because Google's bot thinks a Crawl will overload your server. So, it backs off and reschedules the crawl.
An excellent way to know if your site is overloaded is to check the "average response time" of your site on Google's search console.
To get there, follow this path: Google search console > Setting > Crawl stats.
Usually, the lower the average response time, the faster your page loads. For fast indexation, Google recommended maintaining an average of 200 ms.
So yes! The site in the image above needs a better average response time. And their page will take time to load. Hence, the need to monitor and optimize your page speed.
How to fix this
One way to reduce server response time is to use reliable hosting in the first place. It would be best to opt for a dedicated hosting plan, as shared hosting often slows a site down.
Also, if you’re on WordPress, you don’t want to overwhelm your site with too many plugins. Web design experts recommend no more than 20 plugins on a WordPress site.
Your Codes Prevent Google From Crawling
There are specific codes on your website that prevent search engines from indexing your website.. They are the "No-index" and "No-allow" meta tags.
A noIndex tag allows crawling but blocks Google from indexing a page.
In contrast, no-allow discourages search engines from crawling in the first place. These tags can be added to the robots meta tag session of an HTML file.
How to Fix
Inspect the html code on your entire website and ensure a code similar to this:
Isn’t present in the header session. If it’s present, set the content value to blank.
Trying to Publish Too Many Pages At Once on Search Engine
Because programmatic SEO sites generate thousands of pages in a few days, they often make the error of trying to publish too many pages at once.
When that happens, you end up exceeding your crawl budget. Crawl budget is simply the number of pages Google bot is allowed to crawl on your site daily.
Usually, new websites with low domain authority are assigned a lower crawl budget than older ones.
So, how many pages should you publish daily?
If you have a crawl budget of 100 and you try to publish 1,000 pages at once, only 100 will be crawled and indexed by the Google bot, and the remaining 900 will be scheduled for crawling at a later date.
When you publish more content than your crawl budget allows, Google bot will struggle to keep up with published content, and certain pages will stay un-indexed.
How to fix this
The best way to solve this issue, especially for new websites, is to employ drip publishing. Drip publishing allows you to publish new content in batches.
This way, you don't overwhelm Google bot, and you give your audience something to look forward to daily.
Drip publishing also ensures you stick to a publishing schedule that ties in with your crawl budget. For example, if you have 1,000 pages to publish and you have a 100 daily crawl budget, you can split publishing over ten days.
In addition, as you publish content consistently, your website authority will increase. Once it does, your crawl budget will go high as well. And you will be able to publish and index more pages
Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are pages with no internal links pointing to them. An orphan page is not added to your site’s general structure. This makes it difficult for search engines to discover and crawl the page.
The reason most pSEO sites are likely to have orphan pages is because most of the content is directly published on their site without going through a review process.
How to Fix
In our opinion, the best way to prevent orphan pages for a pSEO site is to manually review and add internal links to content before they are published to your CMS.
It’s a gruesome process, but it will save you a lot of headaches.
Secondly, if you suspect you already have orphan pages, our advice is to find them. You can do so by exporting the list of crawlable URLs on your site from Google search console.
Next, look for the pages with no internal links pointing to it. Those are your orphan pages. This guide from Ahrefs will show you how to do that.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content happens when different URLs on your site have similar content. Having too many duplicate content on your site could harm your page authority.
Also, because you have different pages targeting the same keyword, bloggers are likely to link to different URLs when driving high-quality backlinks to your site.
This way, you end up distributing backlinks among different versions of the same page.
How to fix
The easiest way to fix duplicate content is by using canonical tags. Picking one content as the canonical page instructs Google of which version to render to search results.
This way, the canonical will receive all the authority signals for that content.
Google, still not indexing your site? Here are Some Quick fix
If you're sure that you haven't defaulted in any of the areas above, and your page still remains unindexed, employing one of those tactics will help:
Manual Indexation With Google Search Console
When Google is not indexing your pages, a quick fix is to manually submit the URL of the page you want indexed via the URL inspection tool on Search console.
To request indexing, follow these steps:
- Log into Google search console and navigate to "URL inspection."
- Copy URL of the page you want indexed
- Enter URL on the search bar at the top of the page
- Wait for search console to retrieve data from Google index
If your page is indexed, Google returns with a response like this:
If the URL is not on Google, simply click on “Request indexing” to manually ask Google to index the page.
The issue with this method is that it's not doable when you have hundreds of URLs to Index. Uploading one after the other doesn't sound like a smart strategy.
Keep in mind that you can also monitor your site’s indexation status with Google search console. On your dashboard, you will find information on the pages Google indexes, and those they haven’t.
Bulk URL Indexation with IndexMeNow
IndexMeNow is one of few third-party SEO tools that index pages in bulk. Unlike Google search console, IndexMeNow helps you index up to 2,000 URLs simultaneously.
You can either list the link directly on the URL field (As we did below) or arrange in a file and upload it afterward.
And click “Save”to index the link.
Note: To do this, you need to purchase some credits, else it will return an error message.
Submit a Sitemap to Search Engines
A sitemap is another way of submitting URLs in bulk for indexation.
Again, you can submit your sitemap in Google search console by navigating to "Sitemap." The easiest way to build a sitemap is to use an Xml sitemap generator tool such as Screaming frog, Yoast SEO sitemap plugin, or Inspyder.
Create your content with SEOmatic
Another way to avoid the slow indexing route for a new page is to create your pages with SEOmatic. With our built-in indexing feature, pages created with our software are instantly indexed on Google in a few days.
Want to relieve the frustration of slow page indexing? Sign up for a Free Trial and start creating “Quick-to-Index” content in a few minutes.
Final Words
There you have it. Most page indexation issues are down to Google Penalty, low-quality content, or bad links. Before you submit your URL to Google search console, ensure all pages follow the instructions in their Search essentials guide (Formerly called “Webmaster guidelines”).
