Search Engine Optimization is the most important step that needs to be taken in order to make your website visible to the consumer. Search Engine Optimization makes sure that your website is in the top results when keywords are entered into the search engine. But for your website to show up in search results, Google has to first index it i.e. crawl through the pages and give it a ranking. In this write-up, you shall read about how to resolve google indexing issues when Google is unable to crawl through and index pages on your website.
The content on the website will include certain keywords and phrases which would be the highest possibility of what the consumer would type in the search engine.
After a month or so of starting your website and having carried out search engine optimization, it is advised by many well-established website business owners to carry out a check of whether the applied changes to the website are having a positive effect to the ranking of the website or not.
This process of checking the integrity of your SEO is aptly known as SEO audit, and it is a process that should be carried out regularly.
This is not only a way of checking whether the systems in place are working properly or not, but also to check how changes and updates can be made to the existing system to better the chances of your websites in achieving higher ranks on search engine results.
Whenever starting a new project involving SEO audit, the first step involves looking for issues in indexing. The following article will be brief on what is meant by indexing and what kind of issues you can come across with respect to indexing.
What is Indexing?
Indexing is one of the most primary functions of a search engine, but also one of the most important ones. Indexing involves collecting and storing data related to a website. The index of data is created so that the information available is sorted and available in one place from where it can be picked up and made available to the user as relevant results.
Indexing is carried out by the search engine by crawling through web pages, which is why the process is also known as crawling. The crawling is carried out by search engine automate robots, which are also known as search engine spiders.
The spider would freely crawl through a web page and decide the relevance and quality of the material provided. Even now, spiders are crawling all over the internet through web pages, weeding out what is unnecessary and keeping what is precious. This process can be carried out at lightning speed by a spider.
The spiders move through the internet web through internal links between different pages. This means that the more you are you are connected to external websites and web pages, the more often will a search engine spider move through your page.
The more times the spider moves through your page, the better would be your ranking on the search engine result.
How to resolve Google Indexing Issues with Ease…?
Now that we know what indexing is, we will be going through the steps that are taken during an SEO audit in an indexing overview.
Pages Exclusion and Inclusion
A website is a large amount of data and includes many pages of information. It is not necessary to get all the pages indexed as not all of them may contain enough content, which is negative with respect to SEO. You need to prioritize all the pages that need to be included and all the pages that can be excluded.
When it comes to exclusion of pages, any private data stored on the website and less valuable content like terms and services, privacy policy and use of cookies can be excluded from indexing. Thank-you pages, which appear when a user converts on a particular landing page and gets access to downloadable offer, can also be excluded from indexing.
Another way to avoid pages from being crawled is through ‘no index’ meta tag. It can be added to a page’s HTML code to exclude a specific URL. During a crawl, the spider has access to the internal link. Once it comes across a no index meta tag, it abandons the complete link.
To indicate what pages should be indexed by the spider, you can add a robot.txt file to the site. The submitted website will be located like www.yourdomain.com/robot.txt. The robot.txt file acts as an instruction to the spider, so before it even begins the crawl, it will look for the file. Robot.txt is a public file visible to all, so be careful not to add it to any private data pages.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file in which the structure of the content in the webpage is mapped out. Even if you have created a clutter-free and well-organised website, it is always advisable to submit a sitemap of the webpage as it helps in improving the crawl-ability of the website.
When creating a sitemap, the order or hierarchy of the pages should be arranged in such a way that the high priority pages get crawled first and are more visible.
Broken Pages – 404 errors
During your first SEO audit, check for the existence of any 404 error pages and fix them. It is necessary for you to fix this error page as it has adverse effects on indexing. Just as you would never bother with a broken down house, as a spider comes across a broken page, it immediately leaves.
A high number of broken pages on the same website indicates poor condition and affects the overall ranking.
Redirects
If you come across a broken link, look for the data it provides. If the data is intact, just fix the URL. However, if the data doesn’t exist anymore then forward the page to an appropriate replacement.
Duplicate Content
Sometimes websites end up posting the same content twice. If something like this happens, the website will get a Google penalty. Duplicate content is also a bad thing if you consider the users. Get rid of duplicate content.
Conclusion
Indexing issues are the first step to overcome when you carry out an SEO audit. This is important as, without indexing, your website would never be ranked. It is a good practice to go back to your site once in three months and perform and indexing audit. This ensures that your website is search engine friendly throughout the year.
