Google Indexing Issue, Possible Reasons For Indexing Problems

Google Tweeted on 3rd June 2020 – “We are currently experiencing indexing issues that may cause stale search result in some cases.”

There was a tweet the same day stating that this Google Indexing Issue 2020 had been resolved. Indexing issues can cause serious problem for websites which are dependent upon buzzing or new contents. While this small glitch in Google’s Indexing may not seem too much of an immediate problem if your business website does not belong to the above mentioned group; not being indexed by Google is an issue which cannot be taken lightly. Wondering why? Let us explain. 

Google bots after crawling the web pages on the internet, gathers the content together and makes a list i.e. indexes the web pages. And after indexing, the pages are ranked. Ranking determines the way or the sequence in which the web pages appear in the search results. However, there may be some errors, some problems, which may lead to errors in Google indexing. In these situations, Google is not able to add your website to its database, and this is a cause for worry. There also lies a possibility that your website is very new and has not yet been crawled. In short, it is important to know whether your web pages are indexed or not. Only then can you find the Google Indexing problems and solve them accordingly.

So, how can you know the Indexing status of your web pages? Well, Google Search Console or Google Webmaster Tool is your answer. This free tool by google has an array of tools and reports which help you find errors, address various malwares, solve spam issues, etc. Other than that there is also Google Index checker tool which lets you know about your indexation as well as ranking status. Sounds easy? It is. But, the question is what if your web page or website is not indexed? What are the possible reasons for problem in indexing and how to fix them? Let’s find out.

Possible reasons and fix for Google Indexing errors:

• A Sitemap: A sitemap lists all the web pages on your website in a format which is easy o crawl for Google bot. Thus, all the pages on your website can be easily crawled and indexed by Google. Having a Sitemap is an important factor for SEO, and thus is not one to be missed.

• A Noindex: The meta robots tag has an option of adding ‘noindex’ to stop Google from listing a web page. Or it is possible that you may have send a HTTP request with a ‘noindex’ header; which also will prevent Google from indexing. Usually a ‘noindex’ is used for the webpages you don’t want to be indexed, or even when your website is in the process of development. You thus may want to check if the web page you want to be indexed has ‘noindex’ applied to it and remove it.

• A Robots.txt: A Robots.txt file, similar to the meta tag has function to ‘disallow’ the Google bot from crawling and indexing web pages. So, you need to make sure that you have not setup your robots.txt wrongly, or on web pages which doesn’t require it. If you find this as the reason for Google indexing error, you immediately should remove it.

• Broken Links: There is a possibility that some of your URLs may be broken. Broken internal links as well as a rather slow server connection can be an indexing problem for your web sites. Crawling web page costs money for Google. Thus, when Google comes across a website which has 3 of the first 5 web pages with broken links, it assumes that there will be similar problems with other web pages within that site, and altogether abandons the craw of that website. Thus, you need to find out if there are any internal links which are broken and fix them.

• A Penalty: While SEO is must for Search Engine ranking, it is important that you follow white hat SEO practices. If you follow practices such as adding hidden links, cloaking, sneaky redirects, comment spam, over optimizing anchor text links, purchasing links, having links from spammy websites, etc.; you may be penalized by Google. Manual Penalty by Google means that your website will not show on Google Search Engine for anything. And if you are wondering how you can get a penalty if you don’t follow any unethical practices, well it is possible that the websites from where you have gotten your links may be a spam, and you may get penalized anyway. Google Search Console can easily let you know if that is the case for your Indexing issue. So, how do you deal with a penalty? You need to clean up and fix for what you have been penalized. For example if yours is an ‘unnatural links penalty’, you need to cleanup the complete back link profile of your website and disavow spammy links. After fixing the problem, you simply make a sincere request for reconsideration. And yes, do make sure you are transparent and let Google know that you don’t follow unethical practices.

• A Duplicate Content: Content is king, and it gets you a good SERP rank on Google. However, your content needs to be unique, it cannot be the same. If two or more of your web pages have similar content, Google will consider it duplicate content and crawl only one web page. And thus, the other web page(s) will not be crawled and indexed. This happens majorly when you are an e-commerce site and you have two or more very similar products on sale. If the content is very similar for all of them, it will generate duplicate content. So, make sure that your content is always unique.

These are some of the probable reasons your website is facing Google Indexing issues and how you can find and fix these problems.