Indexing is the process of getting Google to display your website page(s) in their search results.
Google “index” refers to all of the pages Google displays on their platform to people searching.
This includes both the pages on the first page and all the other pages.
Indexing isn’t the same as ranking; however, you can’t rank if you’re not indexed.
I’ll now go over why some websites struggle with indexing and then a few indexing tips for you to make your SEO campaign easier.
~6 Minute Read
Quick Answer
If you're not indexed on Google, you can't rank on Google. Simple as that. You need to be indexed on Google to rank, get traffic, and make money. A page can experience indexing issues for a few reasons, mostly due to the low quality of the page itself or the website as a whole.
How to Check If Your Page is Indexed on Google
It’s very simple.
You can take your page’s URL. For example, let’s take our blog post:
What you’d do is copy the URL of the page, go to Google, and do a site:URL search.
If you see your page displayed, then it is indexed. If you don’t see it, it’s not.
It is as simple as that. No other tool can replace this check. Here’s what you’ll see if the page isn’t indexed:
This screen above shows that our blog post:
ISN’T indexed.
However, this is manual and can’t be done quickly with hundreds of pages. Google will ask you to fill out this captcha form if you do this type of search a lot.
This is where Google Search Console comes in. To find out your entire site’s indexing status, go to your website and then “Pages.”
Below, you’ll see why some of your pages wouldn’t be indexed. It could be a variety of reasons, like, for example, 404 errors, redirect errors, and more.
However, the ones we’re going to pay attention to are:
- Discovered, currently not indexed
- Crawled, currently not indexed
Why are these two errors the most important?
Well, other errors, like 404s, 5xx, and similar, are your website’s technical mistakes. In other words, you can easily fix them one by one and have Google check those URLs again.
However, with these two, it’s now Google’s “fault” the pages aren’t indexed. Here’s what they mean and how to fix them.
Why Is My Page Not Indexed By Google
In a nutshell, a page won’t be indexed if Google doesn’t find it valuable enough to be displayed on Google results, even on page 10.
It could also be that the page itself is valuable but the entire website is not.
Common Google Indexing Errors
Discovered—currently not indexed
This error means that Google “found out” the page exists but hasn’t “evaluated” if the page should be indexed or not.
Why It Happens?
If your website is brand new and hasn’t yet established “trust” with Google, it can take time for Google to check each page.
How to Solve this Error
As elaborated before on our blog, there’s this thing called “crawl budget.”
In other words, this is the amount of resources Google dedicates towards crawling (simply put, checking out) your website and indexing it on search results.
As your website grows, gets more and more pages in the index, ranks, and gets traffic, so will your crawl budget increase.
Again, in other words, this indicates that you’ll be able to get more of your website’s pages crawled, indexed, and ranked faster than before. It’s like a snowball effect.
But, back to the question: how to solve the “discovered—currently not indexed” error fast.
First, find out which of your pages are affected by this error. Simply click on the error and you’ll see the pages:
Go to Google Search Console, enter your URL in the search bar at the top, and press Enter. Once the screen you see below loads, press “Request Indexing.”
Wait a few seconds for Google to process your request and that’s it!
What you’re doing now is asking Google to “hurry up” with crawling your specific page(s).
This process is also manual, and there’s a certain quota of pages you can submit each day.
Crawled—currently not indexed
This is where things get tricky.
Why It Happens
Google has now crawled your page and said, “We don’t believe your page is valuable enough to our users; hence, we won’t display it in our search results, even on page 10.”
- Why would Google refuse to index your page?
- What does “value” even mean?
Well, here’s what you have to understand. The same way your business has operational costs, so does Google. All of the pages in their index—billions upon billions of them—cost money to host and display to users in their results.
And Google won’t display pages that don’t positively affect their bottom line and lead to more money made than it costs to host them.
Now, whether a page is “valuable” and “affects Google’s bottom line” or not is determined by the answer to the question—does Google think the page will fully satisfy the user’s quest for the knowledge, product, or service, or not?
Each Google user wants to find something—an answer to a question, a product to purchase, or someone to hire for a specific job. Knowing this, Google looks for pages that they think will do this job the best.
Our job as people doing SEO is to show Google that yes, our pages are helpful enough to users that they will not need to go back to Google results and click on other pages to find out more information.
This is partially achieved through relevance, and that’s why we stuff our pages with keywords.
Does this mean you should just include more keywords on your page to fix this error?
Not necessarily.
How to Solve this Error
One could make an entire course just for solving the “crawled—currently not indexed” error.
Reverse-engineering a page and finding out “why it’s not valuable enough” for Google takes experience and knowing what you’re looking at.
Now, to simplify, check if the page has little to no information about how a particular user can achieve their goal.
For instance, you’re on this page to learn about indexing. The reason why this page is indexed is because we’re going through every possible scenario you could run into; hence, your goal is most likely satisfied.
Same with you—will the user fully understand their roofing problem, for example, and call you once they finish reading your page? Will they be convinced enough to end their search right then and there and not look up more roofing companies later?
Check for the “depth” of the page. Anyone can write 1,000 words of junk content, but does the page’s content actually provide insight and ACTUALLY help the user understand:
- Why their roof has leaked
- Why they shouldn’t fix it themselves
- Why you’re the best pick for the job
In a VERY short summary, this is how you solve this error.
Sitewide Issues Affecting Indexing
Then we have instances of an entire site being “spammy,” hindering the success of individual pages. Here’s what can cause that.
Too Many Location Pages
Prevelant issue in local SEO. Yes, location pages can help you get more customers, but having too many of them can actually damage your website.
For new sites, we recommend starting with 5-7 location pages per Google Business Profile (so if you have three Google Business Profiles, that’d be 15-21 location pages), ranking them, and then adding more.
Too Many Unhelpful Pages
If too many of your pages could be considered “low value” (they do not follow the standards I outlined above), then more and more of your pages could struggle with being indexed. Similarly, you can see the snowball effect here as well.
Sandbox
A “sanbox” refers to the period of 3-6 months where a brand new website on a new domain will experience struggles with getting content indexed and ranking.
If you keep following our tips here on this blog, publishing helpful content that’s also SEO-ed properly, and building nice backlinks, you’ll get out of this phase faster than it hit you.
Speaking of…
Spammy Backlinks
This is very unlikely to affect you, unless you’ve been purchasing hundreds of very spammy backlinks to your website.
Link penalties are real, but they can be difficult to experience for business owners who follow our guide on link building for local SEO.
Google Indexing Tips
There are a lot of things you can do to speed up indexing of your pages, but let’s keep it simple.
Here are some of the easiest indexing tips you can apply today on your website.
Internal Linking
Link from each page on your website to at least 3-5 other pages on the site.
This helps Google’s robot “find” your pages much faster than it would without any internal linking.
You can see internal linking all over our website. We do it for a reason, and the result is all of our pages being indexed pretty quickly after being published.
Sitemap
Make sure you have BOTH the XML and HTML sitemaps on your website.
XML is for the robot, HTML is for the people. Link the HTML sitemap in the footer of your website, just like we did (check our footer).
Submit Each Page to Google Search Console
Each new page you publish, make sure it’s submitted in Google Search Console, like I’ve shown you above.
In case you forgot how:
Conclusion
And that sums it up!
Hopefully, you’ve found enough value in this indexed blog post to share it with a friend or a fellow business owner struggling with the same thing.
Other than that, feel free to go through one of our best blog posts:
Good luck!
Bogdan is a local SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow using Google. When he is not helping businesses grow, he works on his own SEO projects, works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.