A common problem faced by businesses and marketers when trying to rank in Google’s search engine is not being indexed correctly. Basically, this happens when Google’s spiders can’t crawl a site properly, which means the website content can’t be found in search results pages. Fortunately, most problems can be resolved fairly quickly, if you know what you’re looking for.
Checking Your Site for Errors: The Basics
The first thing to do is simply type “site:” followed by your domain URL into the Google search bar. This will give you the approximate number of pages that are being indexed by Google. If there’s a big difference between this number and the actual number of pages on your site, you know there are probably some indexing issues.
Next, log into Google Webmaster Tools and check the “Google Index” tab. You’ll then see the total number of indexed pages for your site. Obviously, if this number is not consistent with your website, or it falls at some point, something is happening which will affect your visibility in search engines, which will impact traffic to your site.
Crawler Errors
In the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, take a look at your Crawler Error messages. If there are any issues, they’ll show up here. The most common error message you’ll see is a 404 HTTP Status Code warning, which simply means that whatever page the link is pointing to cannot be found. You can’t prevent every 404 error, but you can fix them. Sometimes, it’s simply a URL that has been mistyped. Here are the other most common crawler errors:
Robots/txt file. A text file such as “User-agent: Disallow:/” instructs search engine crawlers to ignore parts of your website
Metatags. Those that say “noindex” or “nofollow” also tell crawlers to stay away
.htaccess file. An invisible file that can cause multiple website issues if incorrectly configured
Sitemap. A sitemap crawler error means your sitemap isn’t updating correctly. You may need to resubmit a new one
Connectivity Issues. These errors will show if your website host is down for any length of time
Duplicate content, unnatural links, slow page load times, and Flash-based content can also cause Google to have problems indexing your site correctly.
Syntax and Structural Errors
In some cases, syntax errors within the HTML markup can prevent correct indexing, although Google is fairly lenient with these kind of mistakes. You can check these errors with W3C’s HTML Validator.
When it comes to site structure, you need to make sure every link leads to the correct URL. To view your site in text mode — much like a search engine crawler sees it — try using a text browser such as Lynx, Elinks, or SEO-browser.
Inbound Links
A lot of new websites have difficulties when it comes to being indexed. A common mistake is having no inbound links to your website. To make sure you have a few inbound links, make sure your social media profiles include a link to your website URL, or if you own another website that has related content, you could include a link back to your website on there. There are also opportunities on other platforms to get a link to your site, including guest-posting on blogs. Just make sure these sites have a decent ranking with Google, and are relevant to your website content in some way.
Google Penalties
Any website can find themselves receiving a Google penalty, and it’s not always clear why. While this can harm your rankings if you don’t resolve the issue, there are steps you can take to deal with penalties to get your website back on track. For detailed information about recovering from penalties, visit the Google Webmaster Tools Help section.
The best way to avoid Google penalties is to steer clear of dubious SEO techniques that don’t really add any real value to your site. These include:
Automatically generated content
Link schemes
Hidden links or text
Unrelated affiliate programs
Keyword stuffing
Unnatural anchor text
Too many ads above the fold
Duplicate content
Article spinning
In Summary
Making sure your website is seen correctly by Google and other search engines is a vital part of any business’s marketing strategy. The good news is that even if you find out you aren’t being indexed correctly, there are simple and quick methods to identify and resolve many of these indexing issues. It’s an ongoing process, but by avoiding Google penalties and ensuring your site is seen correctly by search engines will make sure your website and content gets the attention it deserves.