Which pages Google can find and index on your site, and learn about any indexing problems encountered.

Hello friends if you are a dedicated learner and earner from internet or a serious blogger you must have faced some problems of not indexing pages this article is going to help you how to fix “Google Indexing problems”

Google indexing problems occur when Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, is unable to access or interpret a webpage, preventing it from being added to the Google Search index. This can result in the page not appearing in search results. Common causes include issues with site structure, content quality, technical errors, and penalties.

Common causes of indexing problems:

New Website: It can take time for Google to crawl and index a new website.

Poor Site Structure: A poorly organized website with inadequate internal linking can hinder crawling. Content Issues: Thin, duplicate, or low-quality content can prevent indexing. Technical Errors: Errors like incorrect canonical tags, robots.txt blocking, or 404 errors can cause indexing problems. Penalties: Manual penalties from Google can block indexing altogether. Crawling Budget: If Google’s crawl budget is exceeded, some pages might not be crawled. “Discovered – currently not indexed”: This status in Google Search Console can indicate that Google has found the page but is not including it in the index.

How to identify and fix indexing problems:

1. Use Google Search Console: The Search Console’s Page Indexing report is a valuable tool for identifying indexing errors.

2. Inspect URLs:

Use the URL Inspection tool to check the index status of specific pages and identify potential issues.

3. Check for errors:

Review the Page Indexing report in Search Console for reasons why pages are not indexed.

4. Fix errors:

Address the identified issues, such as improving content quality, fixing technical errors, or submitting a reconsideration request if a penalty is suspected.

5. Request reindexing:

Once issues are resolved, use the “Validate Fix” option in Search Console to request Google to reindex the affected pages.

6. Ensure proper site structure:

Create a clear and concise website structure with proper internal linking.

7. Improve content quality:

Ensure content is unique, informative, and addresses user needs.

8. Check for “noindex” tag:

Verify that the page is not blocked from indexing by a “noindex” meta tag or robots.txt file.

9. Optimize site speed:

Ensure your website loads quickly, as slow loading times can impact indexing.

10. Monitor indexing status:

Regularly check the Page Indexing report in Search Console to track indexing progress and identify any new issues.

Navigating the report

The Page indexing report shows the Google indexing status of all URLs that Google knows about in your property.

Summary page

The top-level summary page in the report shows a graph and count of your indexed and non-indexed (but requested) pages, as well as tables showing reasons that URLs couldn’t be indexed, or other indexing improvements.

Why pages aren’t indexed table shows issues that prevented URLs from being indexed on your site. Click a row to see a details page that shows URLs affected by this issue and your site’s history with this issue.
Improve page experience table shows issues that didn’t prevent page indexing, but we recommend that you fix them to improve Google’s ability to understand your pages. Click a row to see a details page that focuses on all URLs with the same issue.
View data about indexed pages link shows historical information about your indexed page count, as well as an example list of up to 1,000 URLs that are indexed.

What to look for

Ideally you should see a gradually increasing count of indexed pages as your site grows. If you see drops or spikes, see the troubleshooting section.

Your goal is to get the canonical version of every important page indexed. Duplicate or alternate pages shouldn’t be indexed. Having a page marked duplicate or alternate is usually a good thing; it means that we’ve found the canonical page and indexed it. You can find the canonical for any URL by running the URL Inspection tool.

See more reasons why pages might be missing.

What not to look for

100% coverage: You should not expect all URLs on your site to be indexed, only the canonical pages, as described above.
Immediate indexing: When you add new content, it can take a few days for Google to index it. You can reduce the indexing lag by requesting indexing.

Status

A URL can have one of the following statuses:

Not indexed: The URL is not indexed, either because of an indexing error, or because of a legitimate reason (for example, if the page is blocked from indexing by your robots.txt file, or is a duplicate page). The reasons why URLs weren’t indexed are listed in Why pages aren’t indexed table. Read the documentation for each reason to determine whether it is something that you should fix. The Source value indicates whether this is probably something you can fix.
Indexed: These URLs were successfully indexed. See a sample of indexed URLs by clicking View data about indexed pages below the chart on the summary page for the report.

Reason

The reason why a URL couldn’t be indexed. See the reason descriptions below for a description of each issue and how to handle it, if necessary.

Source

The Source value in the table shows whether the source of the issue is Google or the website. In general, you can fix only issues where the source is listed as “Website”.

Validation

Whether you have requested validation of a fix for this issue, and if so, what the status of the validation attempt is. You should prioritize fixing issues that are in validation state “failed” or “not started” and source “Website”.

After you fix all instances of a specific issue on your site, you can ask Google to confirm your fixes. If all known instances are fixed, the issue count goes to zero in the issues table and drops to the bottom of the table.

Why validate

Telling Google that you have fixed all issues in a specific issue status or category has the following benefits:

You’ll get an email when Google has confirmed your fix on all URLs, or conversely, if Google has found remaining instances of that issue.
You can track Google’s progress in confirming your fixes, and see a log of all pages queued for checking, and the fix status of each URL.

It might not always make sense to fix and validate a specific issue on your website: for example, URLs blocked by robots.txt are probably intentionally blocked. Use your judgment when deciding whether to address a given issue.

You can also fix issues without validating; Google updates your instance count whenever it crawls a page with known issues, whether or not you explicitly requested fix validation.

Pro tip: Validate your fixes by sitemap

To speed up a fix request, create and submit a sitemap containing only your most important pages, then filter the report by that sitemap before requesting a fix validation. A validation request against a subset of your affected URLs can complete faster than a request that includes all affected URLs on your site.

Start validation

To tell Search Console that you fixed an issue:

Fix all instances of the issue on your site. If you missed a fix, validation will stop when Google finds a single remaining instance of that issue.
Open the issue details page of the issue that you fixed. Click the issue in the issues list in your report.
- ⚠️ If you are filtered to a specific sitemap in your report, the validation will apply only to items in the sitemap at the time you requested validation. This might be what you want, or it might not. Just be aware of it.
Click Validate fix. Do not click Validate fix again until validation has succeeded or failed. More details about how Google checks your fixes.
You can monitor the validation progress. Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient. You will receive a notification when validation succeeds or fails.
If validation fails, you can see which URL caused the validation to fail by clicking See details in the issue details page. Fix this page, confirm your fix on all URLs in Pending state, and restart validation.

When is an issue considered “fixed” for a URL or item?

An issue is marked as fixed for a URL or item when either of the following conditions are met:

When the URL is crawled and the issue is no longer found on the page. For an AMP tag error, this can mean that you either fixed the tag or that the tag has been removed (if the tag is not required). During a validation attempt, it will be labeled Passed.
If the page is not available to Google for any reason (page removed, marked noindex, requires authentication, and so on), the issue will be considered as fixed for that URL. During a validation attempt, it is categorized in the Other validation state.

Issue lifetime

Validation flow

Revalidation

See validation progress

To see the progress of a current validation request, or the history of the last request if a validation is not in progress:

Open the issue details page for the issue. Click the issue row in the main report page to open the issue details page.
- The validation request status is shown both in the issue details page and also in the Validation row of the Details table.
Click See details to open the validation details page for that request.
- The instance status for each URL included in the request is shown in the table.
- The instance status applies to the specific issue that you are examining. You can have one issue labeled Passed on a page, but other issues labeled Failed, Pending, or Other on the same page.
- In the AMP report and Page Indexing report, entries in the validation history page are grouped by URL.
- In the Rich Result reports, items are grouped by the combination of URL + structured data item (as determined by the item’s Name value).

Validation request status

Instance validation status

Sitemap filter

You can use the dropdown filter above the chart to filter index results by whether or not they are included in a sitemap. The following options are available:

All known pages [Default] – Show all URLs known to Google, whether or not they are listed in a sitemap.
All submitted pages – Show only URLs listed in a sitemap or sitemap index that was submitted using either the Sitemaps report or a robots.txt file on your site.
Unsubmitted pages only – Show only URLs that were not listed in a sitemap submitted using either the Sitemaps report or a robots.txt file on your site.
Specific sitemap URL – Show only URLs listed in a specific sitemap or sitemap index submitted using either the Sitemaps report or a robots.txt file on your site.

A URL is considered to submitted by a sitemap even if it was also discovered through some other mechanism (for example, by organic crawling from another page).

Details page

Click on a row in the summary page to open a details page for URLs on that site with the same issue or status. You can see details about the chosen issue by clicking Learn more at the top of the page.

The graph on this page shows the count of affected pages over time.

The examples table shows an example list of pages affected by this issue. The list does not necessarily show all URLs with that issue, and is limited to 1,000 rows. Each example row has the following functionality:

Click the row to see more details about that URL.
opens the URL in a new tab.
opens URL Inspection for that URL.
copies the URL

When you’ve fixed all instances of an error or warning, click Validate Fix to let Google know that you’ve fixed the issue.

See a URL marked with an issue that you’ve already fixed? Perhaps you fixed the issue AFTER the last Google crawl. Therefore, if you see a URL with an issue that you have fixed, be sure to check the crawl date for that URL. Check and confirm your fix, then request re-indexing

Sharing the report

You can share issue details in the coverage or enhancement reports by clicking the Share button on the page. This link grants access only to the current issue details page, plus any validation history pages for this issue, to anyone with the link. It does not grant access to other pages for your resource, or enable the shared user to perform any actions on your property or account. You can revoke the link at any time by disabling sharing for this page.

Exporting report data

Many reports provide an export button to export the report data. Both chart and table data are exported. Values shown as either ~ or – in the report (not available/not a number) will be zeros in the downloaded data.

Troubleshooting

The table is sorted by what we think are the most important issues to address. To investigate a specific reason in the indexing errors table:

Click a row in the Why pages aren’t indexed table. Decide whether there is a problem based on the not indexed reason and your indexing goal, and whether this is something that you can fix, based on the source value.
Read the specific information about the issue.
Inspect an example URL affected by the issue:
1. Click the inspect iconnext to the URL in the examples table to open URL Inspection for that URL.
2. See crawl and index details for that URL in the Coverage > Crawl and Coverage > Indexing sections of the URL Inspection report.
3. To test the live version of the page, click Test live URL.

FAQs About Google Indexing

Why is my page in the index? I don’t want it indexed.

Google can index any URL that it finds unless you include a noindex directive on the page (or it has been temporarily blocked), and Google can find a page in many different ways, including someone linking to your page from another site.

If you want your page to be blocked from Google Search results, you can either require some kind of login for the page, or you can use a noindex directive on the page. Using a robots.txt rule is not recommended for blocking a page, and will actually prevent noindex from being seen by Google.
If you want your page to be removed from Google Search results after it has already been found, you’ll need to follow these steps.

Why hasn’t my site been reindexed lately?

Google reindexes pages based on a number of criteria, including how often it thinks the page changes. If your site doesn’t change often, it might be on a slower refresh rate, which is fine, if your pages haven’t changed. If your page has changed substantially since the last recrawl, you can ask Google to recrawl it. Remember, though, that Google automatically recrawls your pages, so don’t bother asking for a recrawl unless there is an important change, and Google doesn’t seem to have noticed it for a while (a week or more).

Can you please recrawl my page/site?

Ask Google to recrawl it.

Why are so many of my pages not indexed?

Look at the reasons detailed by the Page indexing report. Here are the most common reasons for not indexing large quantities of URLs on a site:

You have a robots.txt rule that is blocking Google from crawling large sections of your site. These pages should be marked in the Page indexing report as blocked by robots.txt. Track down and remove the blocking rule in your robots.txt file.
Your site has a large number of duplicate pages, typically because it uses parameters to filter or sort a common collection (for example: type=dress or color=green or sort=price). These pages will be labeled as “duplicate” or “alternate” in the Page indexing report. Google doesn’t index duplicate copies of a page.
The URL redirects to another URL. Redirect URLs are not indexed, only the redirect target.

Google can’t access my sitemap

Be sure that your sitemap is not blocked by robots.txt, is valid, and that you’re using the proper URL in your robots.txt entry or Sitemaps report submission. Test your sitemap URL using a publicly available sitemap testing tool.

Why does Google keep crawling a page that was removed?

Google continues to crawl all known URLs even after they return 4XX errors for a while, in case it’s a temporary error. The only case when a URL won’t be crawled is when it returns a noindex directive.

To avoid showing you an eternally growing list of 404 errors, the Page indexing report shows only URLs that have shown 404 errors in the past month.

I can see my page, why can’t Google?

Use the URL Inspection tool to see whether Google can see the live page. If it can’t, it should explain why. If it can, the problem is likely that the access error has been fixed since the last crawl. Run a live crawl using the URL Inspection tool and request indexing.

The URL Inspection tool shows no problems, but the Page indexing report shows an error; why?

You might have fixed the error after the URL was last crawled by Google. Look at the crawl date for your URL (which should be visible in either the URL details page in the Page indexing report or in the indexed version view in the URL Inspection tool). Determine if you made any fixes since the page was crawled.

Also, the live URL Inspection doesn’t test all the issues covered by the Page indexing report. Most notably, duplicate or canonical conditions are not tested in the live test.