We put a lot of effort, time, and money when designing a website and optimizing it to rank well in search engines. What if it does not rank on Google? All your efforts are lost. We think we have done all the steps right, but if the site is not indexed, our users cannot view our website on Google.
Before we understand why the website is not indexed, let’s know what indexing is; when you write and optimize content, the Google crawler analyses and stores the data in the index. It tells us that the page is being indexed by Google and has followed the Google webmaster guidelines for being shown in the search results. Sometimes a few pages are also crawled before indexing, even if the robots.txt file blocks it.
So when you decide that users should view your content, you need to follow Google’s webmaster guidelines so that you can store your content data in Google’s database. Then, when your website is indexed, it is easy for the search engines to display information to users when performing any query using keywords relevant to your web page.
Even though you try to follow all the rules step-wise for getting your site indexed, sometimes it might not appear in the Google search results. There are many reasons for this, which you can fix in no time.
Table of Contents
Let’s check the reason why websites are not indexed on Google
The website might be New
When we create a website and launch it, we feel that it should be indexed soon so users can view the content. But, it is not the case; Googlebot needs to crawl your content and understand it first before indexing it and storing the data in Google’s database. So, it might take a few weeks for Google to index your web content. So, we need to be patient without worrying about how long it takes for Google to index your website.
As your website is just launched, you must wait until you can build good high-quality inbound links. Unless you have inbound links, your website page authority will not increase. As a result, your page will not appear immediately on the first page of search results; you need to be patient and build good links.
There is a way to find out if Google knows that your website exists by performing a search using site:ahbivdigitalagency.com.
As this website is not new, it will show the results in search engines. It means that Google has crawled the website and saved its data to display to users. So check out your website and see if your web pages are indexed.
One way to get your new website indexed faster is by creating a sitemap and submitting it via Google Search Console. Apart from just waiting for Google to do its work, you can help your website be viewed by crawlers easily through sitemap as it tells Google which pages are important on your website. It informs where to find them.
Check robots.txt File
Using the robots.txt file informs the search engines what pages in your website need to be crawled and what pages to avoid. For example, if certain URLs are blocked on your website, they will not crawl those pages, Google won’t visit them, and will not show the results in the search.
If your sitemap is submitted using Google Search Console, you will get alerts when Google bots try to crawl your blocked URLs. But, even then, if Google does not discover your site, the problem might be something else.
It is better to check once if the robots.txt file is blocking the important pages. Just type “ahbivdigitalagency.com/robots.txt: ” in your browser and press enter. It will display
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow means those pages are blocked and cannot be crawled from Google. It is always a best practice to check if your important pages like blogs, products, or FAQs are not placed under the Disallow section. They will prevent your page from being discovered by Google, and when users search using related keywords, your site won’t show up for them to view and purchase from you.
Enough High-Quality Backlinks
We all know from the beginning that backlinks, especially high-quality links, significantly increase your search rank. There are many things that Google’s algorithm checks while ranking a website and none of us knows what rules it follows during ranking a website. But, one thing is for sure backlinks play a major role in better ranking.
Many free online tools are available to check the number of backlinks you have by using Ahrefs backlink checker or Link Explorer by Moz, etc.
Lack of Website Authority
When you try to build quality backlinks, it relates to domain authority, but for website authority, you need to build very high-quality links. The domain rating is a numerical score that indicates the strength of a webpage’s backlink profile compared to others in its database. For example, the Ahrefs Backlink Checker tool shows the strength of a target website’s backlink profile compared to others in their database on a 100-point scale.
Use any free tool like Moz’s free SEO analysis, which will display your website’s domain authority score. It is a powerful tool that showcases information on which website will rank higher in search engines by measuring root-linked domains, and incoming and outgoing links.
It gives you a chance to compare your score with your competitors to know how many quality backlinks they have and what you need to do to score that level.
Web Page not Aligned With “Search Intent”
Google checks all the websites before indexing to provide users with the best relevant answers to their queries. It is the main reason why your content needs to be aligned and structured properly with appropriate keywords for your target audience to see.
So while writing your content, make sure that it is unique and solves the problem of the user’s intent. Google won’t be able to help if the pages contain irrelevant content. So write content that is useful for the users and for Google to index.
A content marketing strategy is essential to your website, as it will help you fix all your content-related issues. By creating a blog where you publish articles on interesting topics to your target audience and by responding to their needs, you can engage readers with your website and improve your rankings in search results.
Duplicated Content on Your Website
Most web pages have duplicate content, especially if it is an eCommerce product page where the same content is displayed for different URLs. Unfortunately, Google does not index duplicate content as the database has no space.
Google usually indexes canonicalized versions of pages in this case. Using a canonical tag prevents search engines from discovering duplicate content on certain pages. In addition, canonical tags let search engines know which version of the URL to display during a search.
If you do not mark which page is canonical, then Google will identify itself. It is not good as Google does not know how to identify duplicate pages when the right canonical tag is not set. Use free tools to check if your page has any duplicate content.
Google Penalty
Penalties also play a major role in preventing your site from ranking in Google’s search results. Two types of Google penalties are Manual and Algorithmic.
We can fix the Google penalty, as you will receive a message in Google Search Console if you have a penalty. You must follow Google’s guidelines and submit your website for reconsideration to get back on Google.
Conclusion
Many things play a role while indexing a website, such as duplicate content and backlinks. Monitor your website for all important details for a better web experience. Please review the list we provided in case your website is not ranking in search engines.
For more information, contact Ahbiv Digital Agency; we are here to help you further with the right information.
