A mistake, crawling errors, the absence of a sitemap file ... There can be many reasons why your website does not appear on Google (or has stopped appearing).
If that is your case, pay attention to the following list of reasons why Google does not index your website. You will probably solve the mystery and get to see your website in the search pages.
If the reason is still not on the list and you find out later, leave it in the comments.
REASONS WHY GOOGLE DOES NOT INDEX MY WEBSITE
1. Your web page does not have a sitemap file
A sitemap.xml file is simply the set of URLs that make up your web page. Although it may seem complicated to build such a file, there are currently plugins that create sitemaps directly to you and, then, they provide you with the URL of this system (this is the case of the famous SEO WordPress Yoast plugin).
Once you have the URL of your sitemap, you must send it to Google through the Google Search Console tool, a webmaster tool that allows you to track the performance of your website.
2. Google has not had time to index your website
It usually happens if you just launched your website. First of all you should make sure you have uploaded the sitemap file. If you have already done so, the best advice we can give you is to wait a few days, giving Google robots time to crawl your site.
Another option is to "force" Google to crawl your site with the Fetch as Google tool , although they themselves claim that this method has a similar response time to submit a sitemap.
3. Your web page is indexed with a domain that includes or excludes “www”
You must explain everything to Google clearly. If you do not, you may understand that your domain "http://weebly.com" belongs to a page other than "http://www.weebly.com".
Luckily, the Google Search Console tool allows you to establish a preferred domain (called a canonical domain ). To do this, we must first verify the ownership of the two domains, and then decide which is the preferred domain .
4. The robots file blocks certain web pages
Robots.txt is nothing more than a file that indicates which pages should be ignored by search engine "spiders." Therefore, we recommend you review this file and remove the URLs that are causing an indexing problem. If you don't know completely what is the robots.txt file, we recommend this article .
5. Web indexing is blocked (WordPress)
If your website has been created with WordPress, you may have activated the option to deter search engines from indexing the site. To discard this option, go to WordPress and go to Settings à Reading.
6. Your website has the “noindex” meta tag included in the HTML code
Noindex meta tags complement Robots.txt files. These tags are included within the “<head>” of a specific page and are used to indicate content indexing spiders not to crawl the pages indicated with this tag.
In this way, the Google robot removes the particular page from the search results. Its appearance would be the following:
<meta name = »robots» content = »noindex»>
In this link you can get more information about noindex meta tags .
7. The loading speed of your website is very slow
In an increasingly digitalized world and the implementation of mobile phones as an indispensable tool for our lives, the speed of web pages has also gained great importance.
If Google detects that your website takes too long to load, it will probably penalize it by removing it from search engines. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool gives you clues to the speed of your website .
8. Your website suffers from tracking errors
This is easy to verify. Once again, Google Search Console will give us the answer; specifically in its Tracking Errors report . If there is any URL that Google could not track properly or that returns an HTTP error code, we will know with this option.
9. Your web hosting server is constantly falling
There are many companies that offer web hosting services, but not all of them give us the results we need. A good hosting provider must ensure that our website will always be available to users, and that it does not collapse despite the fact that there are peaks of visits.
If your hosting server falls constantly, consider changing rates or even providers.
10. Google has penalized you
Excessive advertising, buying links, copied content ... There are many reasons why Google could penalize your website, so always be sure to follow its quality guidelines .
On the other hand, if your website has been penalized, surely Google has already told you the reason. After following their instructions to solve the problem, you can make a reconsideration request .
11. Your website has duplicate content
Although many times the duplicate content of our websites has been created unintentionally, Google may think that it is deliberately duplicated to manipulate search engine positions. Find out well about duplicate content and how to fix it .
12. Bad configuration of AJAX or JavaScript
Google supports and indexes the two formats, but they are more complicated to index than HTML code. Make sure you have AJAX well configured and it is tracked correctly .
13. The website is blocked by the .htaccess file
It is a famous file that allows the administrator of a web page to apply different access policies to specific directories or files. The goal behind this file is to improve security, but it can also be used to block Google robots.
We hope that with these tips you can index your website again. If you want to count on the help of professionals that help you improve your web positioning, contact our online marketing agency .
