Reports show that hundreds of sites have issues getting indexed by Google. If you have crawling and indexing issues, you may have trouble ranking for you competitive and non-competitive terms. Sometime you may need a little help solving Google indexing issues to increase your keyword ranking position. When you solve these problems, you can take full advantage of long tail keywords.First, however, you have to figure out what your starting point is by pulling some data.
Figure out how many submitted and indexed pages you have using Google Webmaster Central. You will have to submit a sitemap to get this data (in fact, if you’re having indexing problems, check this first. An XML sitemap is usually best for Google.) If you don’t have a sitemap, you can still do a site:domain.com query in Google and see the number of pages listed initially. Then run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings you have, and follow up by enlisting the aid of a crawling program to pull page list from the site. The larger the site, the more problems you will probably come across.
Examine each URL and cross match them to the list of indexed pages, taking note of any that are not indexed.Once you know what is not indexed, rty to navigate naturally to these pages through your site to see if you have unlinked pages or ones with broken connections, or any other issues. Some problems you might find include:
A robots.txt file excluding that page/folder. This can happen during testing, if you forget to by remove that restriction in your robots.txt file afterward.
Several URLs containing excluded parameters. If parameters contain duplicate content, you can make Google ignore it – but you should leave one copy live! Check site configuration, settings, Parameter Handling in your webmaster tools account to see if you accidentally excluded anything.
Duplicate content causing Google to stop indexing. Duplicate content is in many cases inevitable; you just have to tell Google which page you want read by using robots.txt and parameter handling to ‘hide’ them and let bots only get into the page you want them to index easily.
Low numbers of inboud links going to lower pages. If you neglect your deep pages, they may end up unindexed. Especially if no link to new pages exists on an indexed/cached page, or only have a graphical or button link, you may need to add some regular links – preferably inbound ones- too up juice. Flash can also cause indexing problems. Good websites should always have indexable and contextual navigation links.
Figuring out and fixing your indexing issues should be a top priority, and don’t be ashamed to ask for some help. A Google Indexing Service can help ensure that all your pages are properly indexed.
Tags: content, Google indexing, links, navigation