You've spent ages creating a lovely website and you've indexed your site with Google but only one or two pages are showing in search results. This can be a bit of a mystery when one page is showing and a similar page isn't.
Google has become much more selective about which page it will index. Ultimately, this is a good thing as it ensures that readers are only served quality content.
If you think about the type of search results you get when you google a product or service, you'll notice that you get quality results that are closely relevant to what you are looking for and most of the pages are full of useful, up-to-date content. Do your pages do that?
Because Google chooses which pages it wants to show the public, you can't assume it will pick all your pages. If some of your pages aren't indexing then it's time for a bit of detective work. Run through the list below and see if you can identify the problem.
10 reasons why your pages won't index with Google
1. Quality content
Is your page full of quality content that shows you know your subject matter and offers useful information to the reader? Or is your content quite thin and could be better written?
2. The health of your page
What's the user experience of your page like? Is your page slow to load? Has it got broken links, missing images? Is it full of animations that add nothing to the experience?
3. Duplicate content
Does another one of your pages answer the same questions and offer similar content? Maybe you have two similar contact pages, why would Google serve both?
4. You page is not linked
Have you got a page that is floating around and not linked to from the main menu or anywhere else in the site? This orphan page is likely to get ignored.
5. Mobile friendly
Are your pages easy to access on a mobile or are they slow to load, are the fonts too small, is the page layout all over the place? Try running your site through Google's Mobile-friendly Test
6. Poor code
If you've added overly complicated code to your page and the settings are incorrect then it may cause crawling and indexing issues.
7. Your page is set to 'noindex'
You may have accidentally set your page to noindex or nofollow, so Google is doing what you told it to do, and ignoring it!
8. Your sitemap has not been submitted
Google will update sitemaps every few days, but this isn't always the case. So best to submit your XML sitemap every time you make significant changes to your site.
9. Your technical SEO is not set up correctly
Your pages are not well set up for Google to read. Have you tagged all your headings correctly so that Google understands the structure of your page? Do all your images have alt text descriptions? Do your page titles describe the content well? Have you written quality metadata?
10. You're not using a domain name
You've got carried away and published your site on the domain of your website platform eg. Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace eg. wix.mylovelywebsite.com. If this is the case then you need to purchase a domain name and connect it to your website.
One of the best tools to use to discover why pages aren't indexed is Google Search Console. It's free and tells you everything you need to know to fix your pages.
And remember that indexing takes time. It can take several days of problem solving and a lot of patience before your pages start showing as a search result.
If you need help with your business SEO then please get in contact for a chat.