Your website might not be getting indexed at all or properly in Google, Bing, or other search engines. We have a clear answer to why your website or webpages are not indexing properly in search engine results.

Read this guide if you have page indexing issues detected by Google search console. We have updated this page with some updates based on Google’s algorithmic behavior, technical suggestion, and made it easier to understand.

• Technical Issues
• Content from Sensitive Categories
• Content Discovery Hassle
• Website Age, Low Reputation
• Public Reputation & Feedback Impact

Following are the potential indexing issues that webmasters and SEOs should fix: –

Technical Issues

If your website is facing technical issues, it is hard for search engines to discover, crawl, analyze, and index it. For example:

• such as server errors (500, 501, 502, 504 etc.)
• too many broken links (404 errors)
• misconfigured robots.txt contents or bad meta robots tag definition
• too many redirects (SSL redirects, bad ending hash redirects, poor permalink setting)
• hacked websites usually get penalized easily since hackers either create unwanted pages with poor content, or add redirects to their sites, etc. leading to multiple technical issues
• SSL Issues
• malicious content such as on some pages you have executable scripts

Content Falling in Sensitive Categories

Search engines take special care before indexing content from sensitive categories which could have a direct or serious impact on people.

• Medical content is not indexed right away since it may involve promoting illegal drugs, wrong prescriptions or opinions, or more which may impact the user in dangerous way. – Build authority in medical niche to let Google know you’re always careful about it. See healthline.com as an example
• Other sensitive categories including war (such as Ukrain-Russia war), magic, etc.
• Filtered content categories: if your content can only appear when Safe Filter is turned off, then indexing needs additional attention.

Content Discovery Hassle for Search Engines

If your website is not making an effort to provide an ease to search engines for crawling, definitely you’re missing a lot on proper indexing.

• too many links to evaluate – just give time to Google in this case
• duplicate content without proper canonical tag – use canonical URLs to let Google decide easily which content to index
• duplicate content with proper canonical tag
• no sitemap – just submitting sitemap doesn’t mean Google will index. It will still take time, however, the discovery becomes easier with providing sitemap.
• missing strong internal linking – Google crawls your website and finds internal links too. If you’ve related useful content, link that within your articles/content/pages to let Google crawl more of them.

Website Age, New Site Sandbox, Low Reputation

If your website is quiet new, it is obvious that it will take some time for search engine especially Google to trust your content. In this case even if you submit sitemaps, not everything get indexed quickly. It takes at least 3-6 months for new sites (who’re making continuous effort to build useful content) to have a good crawl and indexing routine.