Churning out engaging content might be the easy part, but distributing it effectively across the internet can have its challenges. That is not to say you won’t face hurdles. One can feel utterly drained when having to deal with a lack of response to their content. To make matters worse, discovering that their webpages have not been indexed in Google Search Console can feel like throwing a party with no attendees. There are numerous businesses, both large and small, who express their frustrations towards Google for their apparent opaqueness. As a result, many begin to doubt the quality of their content, their websites, or even every minute detail they have worked on. Luckily, that panic is unwarranted. Google deliberately not indexing certain pages is highly plausible. If you are running a business in Dubai, you know how important visibility is so partnering with a trustworthy SEO agency in Dubai can help in figuring out the mess while making your pages visible again on Google.
So, let us take a look at the main issues that could lead to Google ignoring your pages, and the possible solutions.
Possible Reasons Google Is Ignoring Your Pages
Robots.txt Blocking:
This error is as antiquated as they get. The robots.txt file tells the search engines which of your pages they can crawl and which ones to ignore. Googlebot is reading your pages, but if you blocked access for him in your robots.txt, they won’t get indexed.
● Real Example to Illustrate: I had a client that had a redesign of their website done recently. There was a staging version of the site and the developers had properly blocked it with robots.txt. However, they forgot to remove the block from the live site. Days turned into weeks and the new site wasn’t being indexed.
● Personal Touch: It’s like waiting for someone to come visit you while standing behind a door that has a ‘Do not enter’ sign on it.
Noindex Meta Tag:
Just like with robots.txt, along with the noindex meta tag, you can tell search engines not to index the page. If you added that tag, either intentionally or not, Google is going to respect that.
● Real Example Highlighting: You can explain how dancers often look at the audience and how it portrays an effect from the audience’s point of view. One blogger that I read everyday put a noindex tag on his primary blog page. He was looking into why his traffic had dropped like a rock from the sky. Looking at the source code of the page showed me the reason so all I had to do was a quick check.
● Personal Touch: It’s like putting my palms together and whispering ‘don’t look at me’ because I desperately yearn for engagement.
Poor Website Structure:
If your website is poorly structured, Googlebot might be missing your pages when it comes to crawling and indexing. Orphaned pages that have no internal links and a deep and complex site structure could all be factors.
● Real Example: I once performed an audit on a website that had thousands of pages, but their internal linking was chaotic. Googlebot would systematically get lost when attempting to index the site because there were so many important pages that were too deep in the site with no clear path to them.
● Personal Touch: It’s like being in a maze and trying to get to a specific room with no map.
Low-Quality Content:
Google always favors high quality content. In the case where your pages are thin, duplicate or generally low value, Google might not index your pages.
● Real Example: A certain website that auto generates content was not being indexed for their pages. The content was literally just rephrased content from other websites, so Google had no value for it.
● Personal Touch: It’s like handing in a paper that has a lot of fluff and expecting a high mark.
Canonicalization Issues:
When it comes to the content on your website, if there are two similar copies, it’s ideal to use canonical tags to indicate to Google which one is the preferred version. In the case, you didn’t set up the canonical tags correctly, Google will get confused and won’t index any of the duplicate pages at all.
● Real Example: A product page in one ecommerce store had too many URLs. Because of Google’s URL parameters, Google was left confused and did not index any due to that confusion.
● Personal Touch: It’s like having a bunch of copies of a picture, but there’s no designated “official” version that is able to be shown.
Crawl Budget Limitations:
Your website has a number of pages which serve as a crawl budget within a time frame Google allocates for your site, which is how many pages it will crawl. If your site is big and the crawl budget is small, then Google won’t be able to get enough time to crawl all of your pages.
● Example: A website that consists of 100,000 pages, wasted their crawl budget value with low-end pages. As soon as those pages were deleted, Google was able to index the more significant pages.
● Personal Touch: It’s like having limited time at a buffet; you have to choose what’s worth your time.
Errors:
Having slow pages, missing webpages, and server errors are reasons why Google would have trouble trying to index your website.
● Real Example: Once a client came to us with an issue of their server error which resulted in every page within the website not being able to be crawled by Google. After we resolved the server error, their pages are indexed.
● Personal Touch: This reminds me of trying to till a conversation while dealing with a poor phone connection.
You Can Take Action
● Update robots.txt and meta: Take care that you don’t prevent Google from crawling your site inadvertently.
● Enhance your website: Ensure that your website has a proper structure that is easy to follow.
● Produce engaging content: Aim at giving high quality content that is beneficial to your users.
● Fix problems of canonicalization: Avoid misusing canonical tags.
● Maximize the efficiency of the crawl budget: Help your website by increasing the speed and eliminating unnecessary poor-quality pages.
● Repair mistakes: Make sure that there are no errors in your website and try to correct them as frequently as possible.
If you need further assistance, speaking with a digital marketing agency in Dubai would help. They would offer professional help such as completing an SEO audit which would allow your website to be indexed. In circumstances where a website requires significant restructuring so that it can be more accessible for search engines, a firm dedicated to web designing in Dubai would make a more user optimised and search engine friendly website.
Keep in mind that indexing your pages is the foundation of visibility on the internet. Keep pushing forward!