It’s happened to many of us: You work hard on a blog post and wait for traffic to roll in. When that doesn’t happen, you start troubleshooting and discover that your post hasn’t been indexed by Google. Let’s chat about why this happens and what you can do about it!
[00:00:36] The first birthday of Pay Less for traffic. I can't believe it, but we've been having our chats for a full year now. So to celebrate this milestone, I decided that this month we're going to be tackling questions that I've received over the past year. I love when listeners tune into an episode and then send me dms with follow up questions.
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[00:01:15] I had a listener reach out to me after she had checked her indexing report on Google Search Console. She discovered that she had a lot of URLs that hadn't been indexed, and she wanted to know more about why this happens and if there's anything that can be done about it. I gave her a few things to think about, but then I made a mental note to go ahead and cover this topic on the podcast, So in this episode, I'll give you a quick refresher on what Google indexing is, so we're all on the same page. Then I'll share some reasons why posts aren't indexed, and finally we'll chat about things you can do to fix it. I think I've shared on the podcast before that Google runs like one big filing cabinet.
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[00:02:17] Bots will periodically crawl your website to check for new content, and then Google will make a decision about where that content belongs in the index. Now, the important thing to remember is that you as a content creator have no say in where Google puts your content in that filing cabinet or whether they put it in the filing cabinet at all.
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[00:03:07] In fact, it's possible that your content will end up in a stack of posts from your website that Google is aware of, but chooses not to index. Because if you think about it, crawling all of the content on the internet is a resource heavy venture, especially now in the days of mass produced AI content. So if something is in the index, it becomes part of the crawling process for your website moving forward, because bots will need to track changes, new links, and all of that.
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[00:04:05] And when you click on the ones that have not, you get a breakdown of the different reasons and how many posts have been not indexed for that particular reason, and so I thought we would just run through some of the most common ones. I'm not gonna go through all of the reasons why posts don't get indexed, but just using my own Google search console as inspiration, I'll go through some of the most common reasons. So one of the first reasons why a post is left out of the index is that there has been a redirect or it has been deleted. When bots know that a post used to be there but no longer exists or has been redirected, it will show up as a non indexed URL for a while. Eventually, those will kind of drop off in your report.
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[00:05:18] My indexing report is full of URLs that have tailwind, Pinterest, or even Facebook tracking attached to the URL. So Google doesn't need to index these versions of the post URL. They're just going to index the original post only. Up to this point, all of the reasons for no indexing make a lot of sense. Why should Google keep indexing a URL that no longer exists, or a post that's clearly a duplicate of another piece of content on your website?
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[00:06:19] Sometimes these posts are considered thin content. They don't provide enough context to Google about the contents of the post. Another reason is they might be orphaned posts, meaning that they don't have inbound or outbound internal links. And so that sends a signal to the bots that this content is really not important in the grand scheme of your website, otherwise you would be linking to and from it.
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[00:07:10] What can you do about it? Well, first, if you're just getting started with blogging it in SEO, you can submit your site map to Google. So this process basically throws your hat in the ring for the crawling process, you're saying, I have a website, it has content, here's where you can find the list of the content on my website.
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[00:08:02] And so if you type that in, you will see your site map, or you should. And so then what you do is you copy that URL and in Google Search Console, you can submit that site map to Google. So then once Google knows where to find your site map, you've kind of thrown your hat in the ring. Then Google will eventually start to index your content.
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[00:08:52] I mean, we all know this is important, but the part that often gets overlooked is that you also need to go back into an existing blog post and add a link to this new piece of content that you've just written. This sends the signal to Google that this is an important piece of content since you have other blog posts linking to it.
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[00:09:35] there's a link there where you can request indexing, and this is especially helpful if you start to update or publish content after a long stretch of not blogging because your publishing patterns can actually contribute to your website's indexing schedule with the Google bots. If they crawl your website at a particular interval and notice that your website hasn't changed at all, the bots are going to start crawling it less and less often, which makes sense.
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[00:10:26] I know that this has been a quick introduction to indexing, but I hope it's made you feel better about that big number of non indexed posts that you see in Google Search Console. Ultimately, indexing is up to Google, but you can give your content its best chance possible by focusing on the SEO and blogging best practices that I share here on the podcast and in bring your own traffic.
