In the last few years, I have heard more and more, people are having issues getting Google to index their site. Sometimes people report it’s a gradual dropping of indexed pages and other times most of their pages are kicked out of the index.
And believe me, I also have had issues on some blogs I own. It has caused me to search for the answer as well.
From what I see and all my research, it seems as if Google threshold for quality has taken a huge upturn. They are now requiring much better content to rank. Plus, it seems they are scaling back on resources. It costs millions to organize the worlds information.
And don’t even get me started in AI content. lol. I played with around 2019-2020 , though it was great for a moment and then realized yeah not so much.
So I plan on keeping this post updated as I do more research on the issue. And trust me, no one really knows exactly what the issues is. We are all just really shooting in the dark here and following best practices.
So, if you are having issues getting your pages indexed in Google you can use this as a guide for things you may not have thought about.
Ok, on to it!
The Google Indexing Issues
Please note: This is all from my years of experience and research I have done. With each issue, I have researched and tried to find a logical, relevant real citation to back it up. Again, this does not mean it’s set in stone or will work for your site.
Problem: Your Website Is New
New websites can have trouble getting into the Google index for many reasons. They don’t have enough pages, enough authority, no links, bad site structure, too slow and others.
Fix to try: If your website is new, keep working on your content and become as good as you can at writing. Over time you will build up a website that has real potential.
Not Enough Backlinks
This is especially a problem for newer blogs and sites. According Backlinko, Links are still important. So if your site is newer your going to have to either build links or build more and better content.
Your Content Has Factual Errors
I have seen this issues before on several websites. And I have seen a whole site deindex because Google deemed the site un-factual. I am sure this depends on the niche and especially for YMYL sites.
Google will put the site in Crawled not indexed in Google search console. So, if you are having indexing issues, make sure to check your content.
Your Using A.I. Content
If you are using content written by artificial intelligence software, then you could have a problem. Google is kind of all over the board right now about this. Danny Sullivan has reported, they are ok with ai content as long as it’s helpful and other Google reps have stated AI content is bad.
So, if you have written articles with AI, and your site is having indexing problems, then you may want to rethink your a.i. content strategy.
You Have Duplicate Content On Your Site
Another Google indexing issues problem I see with indexing is, sites that have duplicate content. This is a big one and many site owners do not really understand it. If your site has content that is very similar to each other, then it’s best to consolidate those pages.
Take the time to go through your site and look for content that has the same type of keywords . Then start pruning the content or use a canonical directive.
Google used to not care as much about this type of issue, but as of 2023 it seems they are starting to cut back on resources and making moves like deindexing whole sites.
Check Your Internal Links
If you do not have any internal links in your site, you need to start asap. Internal linking is how Google and visitors can crawl through your site. In other words it builds your sites structure. And, yes it’s very important.
I highly recommend not using software for internal links and to do it by hand. Software just seems to be caught by Google every-time.
There have been varying reports of over optimizing with keywords anchors internally. But until I find more about this I cannot truly say. The Google webmaster SEO guide states to use anchors.
Using Original Images
This is another issues I have started to see more of. Websites that use images from other sites or have the same images all over their site. Seem to have indexing issues now. Yes, Google can read images. Just use Google image search to see.
I have had a few cases where we have changed the images and parts of sites were able to get re-indexed.
