Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?
-
Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed.
I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not.
So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed.
But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out.
Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?
-
Good luck!
-
Thanks Will, appreciate the insight. I'm going to get the Bing and Google wordpress plugins on there to see if that helps, build up a few more links and give it some time to wait and see. Thanks!
-
You're not the only person reporting odd indexation happenings here on Q&A (see for example this question). And, just like I found for that question, your site appears to have more pages indexed in Bing than in Google - which at least seems to point to us not having missed something obvious like meta noindex or similar.
I did also read Google saying that they had issues with the site: command (link) but I don't think that can have anything to do with your situation as they say they have now fixed that issue, and I couldn't find any other pages on your site even with non-site: searches (i.e. it does genuinely appear as though those pages are missing from the index).
While I am loathe to point just at links these days, I do wonder if in this case it is just a case of needing some more authority for the whole site before it is seen as big enough and important enough to justify more pages in the index.
-
Thanks, I've actually submitted request to be indexed multiple times over the last 3 weeks to no avail.
-
Hey Daniel. I agree with Chris. I have also noticed slow indexation recently. Might be a pain in the arse, but maybe you should request each page to be indexed individually in Search Console to add them to the high priority queue.
-
Hi Will, thanks for reaching out! No, not yet resolved. Still struggling to figure this out. I sent you a message on Facebook and Linkedin- would love to connect and try to get this figured out!
-
We keep adding blog posts almost every day, still not getting in the index for some reason. Discovered, yes. Crawled, yes. But not indexed, and no errors or anything.
-
Hi Daniel. Did you get this resolved / did it resolve itself? I'd happily take a look if you'd like if not - just let me know the URL.
-
My advice is, start listing more reviews! It will be picked up by google automaticly. You gotta be a bit more patient. New websites take awefully alot of time to be indexed.
I had a domain of 10+ years of age, replaced it's website, within one day completely reindexed. I have new domains, they can take up to weeks or even a month to be indexed. It's normal.
-
I actually got a quality link 2 weeks ago, but the blog post the link was published in still isn't indexed by Google either. The rest of his site is, just not his newest article for some reason, and it's 2 weeks old now. Another mystery...
-
It's a review website, and only 3 of my 24 reviews are indexed. All are discovered, most even crawled, but only those three in the index. And when I updated them, the search listing in Google results was updated within a few days. So they came back, are aware of the changes, but just not adding the others to the index.
And there are no affiliate links on this site at all. No spam, no links to spam, and I've attached a blog with 500+ word well written articles (about 20 so far) and none of the blog posts are indexed either.
I've never seen anything like this. The content is good, but almost none of it is getting indexed for some reason, despite being discovered and crawled.
-
Get quality links.
-
It's a new domain, no previous ownership, and no issues detected in search console for manual actions or security. There's no robots, noindex or any of that going on. They just won't index a bunch of the pages for some reason and it's very odd.
-
Perhaps the content on those 42 pages or so is alot copy content based? Or pages that really dont matter to be up in search?
-
I'd hold off worrying about it for now. I've heard many people talk about slow indexation lately. In the mean time, aside from the obvious check-for- nofollow- noindex-robots.txt suggestions, have you looked into the history of this domain? By chance was it penalized before you bought it?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?
Hi Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Google de-indexed a page on my site
I have a site which is around 9 months old. For most search terms we rank fine (including top 3 rankings for competitive terms). Recently one of our pages has been fluctuating wildly in the rankings and has now disappeared altogether from the rankings for over 1 week. As a test I added a similar page to one of my other sites and it ranks fine. I've checked webmaster tools and there is nothing of note there. I'm not really sure what to do at this stage. Any advice would me much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
Why my site it's not being indexed?
Hello.... I got to tell that I feel like a newbie (I am, but know I feel like it)... We were working with a client until january this year, they kept going on their own until september that they contacted us again... Someone on the team that handled things while we were gone, updated it´s robots.txt file to Disallow everything... for maybe 3 weeks before we were back in.... Additionally they were working on a different subdomain, the new version of the site and of course the didn't block the robots on that one. So now the whole site it's been duplicated, even it´s content, the exact same pages exist on the suddomain that was public the same time the other one was blocked. We came in changes the robots.txt file on both server, resend all the sitemaps, sent our URL on google+... everything the book says... but the site it´s not getting indexed. It's been 5 weeks now and no response what so ever. We were highly positioned on several important keywords and now it's gone. I now you guys can help, any advice will be highly appreciated. thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Google Maps results doesn't show my site url but rather the maps url, why is this?
For several of my clients landing pages that show up in the Maps results the website url has been overwritten by the maps url (maps.google.com). Even though on my places page I have the correct website set up. Does anyone have any idea why they would be doing this and how I can correct it? Thanks kinldy in advance, Aaron. maps-url.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0