Whether you’re wondering whether your website is being indexed on Google, or you’re looking to find out what happens if your website isn’t indexed, there are a few different ways to check.
Screenshots are not available for the indexed URL
Quite a number of people have been complaining about the same thing. In short, the screenshots that appear on your desktop are not the same as those on mobile devices. If you are a mobile user and a web developer, you might want to reconsider the state of your server. A server that is slow to respond can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort on the part of the site’s visitors. In addition to a slow response time, poor server uptime can cause a number of other problems, from slow load times to mobile-unfriendly warnings.
You probably already know that the web site you work on has been experiencing some issues with its index. If you have been checking your Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you’ve probably noticed that many of the pages that show up in the webmaster dashboard aren’t indexed. The reason is that you haven’t done a good job of ensuring that your server is reliable.
Remove stray noindex tags from meta tags
Adding noindex meta tags is an excellent way to help with SEO, but you need to be careful. Some meta tags aren’t necessarily helpful, and others can be harmful.
Some meta tags help the user, like a meta description to get people to read a page. Other tags help the browser or the search engine, like a meta robots tag.
A robots meta tag is used to let search engine bots know what to ignore or what to crawl. You can also tell search engines if you want all links to be followed or if they should be unfollowed.
Using noindex tags can help with SEO, but they’re also useful for backend organization. For example, if you have a login page, you can add the page to a noindex bucket, and the search engine bots won’t be able to index it.
If you’re worried that your noindex pages aren’t being indexed by search engines, you can use the URL inspection report in Google Search Console. When you see the message No: ‘noindex’ detected in the ‘robots’ meta tag, that means that Google doesn’t think the page should be indexed. You can remove it from Google Search Console, and restore the page’s visibility.
Troubleshoot a missing page
Using Google Search Console (GSC) to check if your website is being indexed can help you troubleshoot a missing page. The tool provides details about the URL, and also shows manual action notifications. You can also export a list of URLs affected by the GSC. You can then prioritize which URLs you want Google to index.
Google will also tell you if the URL is noindexed. If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can noindex pages that contain the rel=canonical tag. This will tell Google that the page is not the original, and will prevent Google from reporting the page as an error.
You can also check the URL’s cached version by using Google’s cache feature. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can also be used to find the cached version of the page.
There are many different reasons why your site is not being indexed. Frequent downtime can also cause indexation issues. You should periodically check the quality of your site and ensure that the site is fully optimized.
10 reasons why Google might not index your website
Having a website doesn’t mean that it will automatically get indexed by Google. There are several reasons that could prevent it from being indexed. Fortunately, there are some ways to fix them.
You need to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to ensure that your site gets indexed. If you aren’t following the guidelines, you could be at risk of being penalized.
Google wants to provide users with a quality experience. For this reason, it will not index pages with poor navigation. It also does not want pages that take too long to load. Likewise, it does not want pages that contain lots of distractions.
Another issue that may prevent Google from indexing your site is duplicate content. This is when you have multiple pages with the same content. You can identify this by checking your Ahrefs Site Audit. It will show you clusters of near-duplicate pages that do not have canonicals.
When you create a new website, Google will have to spend time to discover it. This can take months. If you haven’t established a brand as a trustworthy source, you may not get many visitors from Google.