The 5 Most Common Google Indexing Issues by Website Size

Wondering why you're losing traffic? Here are the 5 most common issues that prevent Google from indexing your webpage, broken out by site size.

Google is transparent about the fact that not every page it can find is indexed. You may view the pages on your website that are not indexed using Google Search Console.

Additionally, Google Search Console gives you helpful details about the specific problem that prevented a website from being indexed.

These problems include 404 errors, server faults, and indications that the website might contain duplicate or thin material.

But we never receive any information indicating which issues are the most prevalent online.

So I made the decision to gather information and create the statistics myself!

The most common indexing problems that are preventing your sites from appearing in Google Search will be covered in this post.

101 indexing

Building an index is similar to creating a library, although Google works with websites as opposed to books.

Your pages must be correctly indexed if you want them to appear in searches. Google has to locate and save them, to put it simply.

Google can then evaluate their content to determine which queries they could be pertinent for.

Getting indexed is a need for receiving Google organic traffic. Additionally, your chances of showing up in the search results increase as more pages on your website are indexed.

Because of this, it's crucial for you to understand whether Google can index your material.

This is what I did to find indexing problems.

My regular activities involve technical SEO website optimization to increase their visibility in Google, and as a result, I have access to a large number of sites in Google Search Console.

I made the decision to employ this in an effort to perhaps lessen the popularity of prevalent indexing problems.

For the sake of transparency, I described the process that produced some intriguing results.

Methodology

I started by assembling a sample of pages using information from two sources:

  • I made use of the information about our clientele that was easily accessible to me.
  • By posting a Twitter poll and contacting several SEOs personally, I requested that other SEO experts provide me with anonymised data.
  • Both turned out to be reliable sources of knowledge.



Non-Indexable Pages Excluded

It is in your best advantage to omit some pages from the index. These include outdated URLs, out-of-date articles, e-commerce filter criteria, and more.

There are several techniques for webmasters to ensure that Google ignores them, including the robots.txt file and the noindex tag.

Such pages would have a negative impact on the accuracy of my conclusions, thus I excluded any such pages from the sample that satisfied any of the following conditions:

  • By robots.txt, blocked.
  • designated as noindex.
  • Redirected.
  • delivering the HTTP status code 404.

Non-Valuable Pages Excluded

I only took into account the pages that are listed in sitemaps in order to further enhance the quality of my sample.

Sitemaps, in my opinion, are the most transparent depiction of important URLs from a specific website.

Of course, a lot of websites have useless content in their sitemaps. Some people even use the identical URLs in their robots.txt and sitemap files.

However, I took care of that in the preceding action.

Data Categorization

According to my research, the prevalence of indexing problems varies with website size.

Here is how I divided the data up:

  • tiny websites (up to 10k pages).
  • Medium-size websites (from 10k to 100k pages).
  • hefty webpages (up to a million pages).
  • massive websites (over 1 million pages).

I had to figure out a way to normalise the data because the size of the websites in my sample varied.

The difficulties that one very large website may be experiencing may overshadow those that other, smaller websites may be experiencing.

I then examined each website separately to sort the indexing problems they encounter. Then, based on the amount of pages impacted by a certain issue on a given website, I allocated points to the indexing difficulties.

The verdict is...

The top five problems I discovered on websites of all sizes are listed below.

  • Crawled but not yet indexed (Quality issue).
  • duplicate information
  • Found but not yet indexed (Crawl quality/budget issue).
  • Soft 404.
  • Crawl problem.

Let's dissect these.

Quality

Your pages may have content issues if they are sparse, inaccurate, or excessively biassed.

You will struggle to have your page indexed (and shouldn't be shocked), if it doesn't offer distinctive, worthwhile material that Google wants to present to users.

Repetitive Content

Even if you didn't intend for that to happen, Google might identify some of your pages as having duplicate material.

Canonical tags linking to distinct pages are a frequent problem. The original page is not indexed as a result.

Use a 301 redirect or the canonical tag attribute if you do have duplicate material.

By doing this, you can make sure that different pages on your website aren't competing with one another for visitors' attention, clicks, and links.

Crumpled Funds

The crawl budget is what? Googlebot will only crawl a specific number of URLs on each page, depending on a number of variables.

Therefore, optimization is essential. Don't let it waste time on pages that are irrelevant to you.

Soft 404s

When a page returns a 404 error, you have attempted to index a deleted or nonexistent page. Soft 404s don't send the HTTP 404 status code back to the server; instead, they show "not found" information.

It's a typical error to point outdated links to removed pages.

Additionally, many redirects could appear as soft 404 errors. Make every effort to keep your redirect chains as short as feasible.

Crawl Problem

There are numerous crawl concerns, but a significant one is a robots.txt issue. Googlebot won't even attempt to crawl your website if it discovers a robots.txt file for it but is unable to access it.

Let's now examine the outcomes for various website sizes.

Tiny websites

  1. Crawled but not currently indexed (quality or crawl budget issue).
  2. duplicate information
  3. The budget is a crawl.
  4. Soft 404
  5. Crawl problem

Large websites

  1. duplicate information
  2. Found but not yet indexed (crawl quality/budget issue).
  3. Crawled but not currently indexed (quality issue).
  4. soft 404 (quality issue)
  5. Crawl problem

hefty webpages

  1. Crawled but not currently indexed (quality issue).
  2. Found but not yet indexed (crawl quality/budget issue).
  3. duplicate information
  4. Soft 404
  5. Crawl problem

massive websites

  1. Crawled but not currently indexed (quality issue)
  2. Found but not yet indexed (crawl quality/budget issue)
  3. duplicated materials (duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical)
  4. Soft 404
  5. Crawl problem

Important Lessons on Common Indexing Problems

It's intriguing that two different website sizes experience the same problems, per these data. This demonstrates how challenging it is for large websites to maintain quality.

  • greater than 100,000 but less than one million.
  • greater than one million.

But the key points are these:

  • Due to a lack of crawl funding, even relatively modest websites (10k+) may not be properly indexed.
  • The crawl budget/quality issues become more urgent the larger the website is.
  • Although the problem of duplicate material is serious, it varies from website to website.

P.S. A Reminder About Google-Unknown URLs

I discovered during my investigation that there is one additional frequent problem that keeps pages from being indexed.

I was astonished to discover that it's still so popular even if it may not have merited a spot in the ranks above.

I'm referring to abandoned pages.

There might not be any internal links pointing to certain pages on your website.

The Googlebot might not even find a page on your website if there is no way for it to find it through your website.

What is the remedy? Include backlinks to relevant pages.

By manually including the orphan page in your sitemap, you can also resolve issue. Unfortunately, a lot of webmasters continue to ignore this.


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