As a website owner, you understand the importance of having your website appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google, in particular, makes it easy to submit your site to their index, but indexing issues can arise at any time, causing your site to disappear from search results entirely or show up when it shouldn’t be there. Fortunately, you can take some straightforward steps to fix Google indexing issues. In this article, we’ll outline 3 simple tips to help you get your site indexed correctly and back in the SERPs as soon as possible.
Determine if your website is indexed
Finding out if your website is indexed by Google (or any other search engine) is very simple. If you don’t know-how, go to one of your pages, copy it, and paste it into a search engine of your choice. If that page comes up in results, you know it’s indexed. However, if no results appear in that search engine, the chances are that your page is not indexed by that particular search engine.
Check for crawl errors.
Search engines have in-built crawlers which are responsible for indexing websites. They visit your website, analyze its content and structure, decide which pages need to be indexed, and then add a link to these pages in their database. If you notice some of your important pages are not showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs), it could be because there is something wrong with how search engines are crawling your site.
Check for updates
Ensure that your robots.txt file is up-to-date, meaning any page you don’t want to be listed in search results has a no-index directive set. This is especially important for dynamic content such as menus, portfolios, and similar features with changing content. A broken link on these pages can send search engines into an infinite loop of re-crawling a page it thinks has changed—even if it hasn’t.
