Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What can go wrong with indexing?
Indexation occurs when Google saves your webpages in its database. So, in order to rank on Google, it’s essential that your website’s high value pages are saved in the database or index. Sometimes issues can arise with indexation, though.
An obvious problem is the content won’t be indexed. So, if Google doesn’t like the content or can’t access the content because a page is broken or returning a 404 error, then it won’t store it in its index, which means the content can’t be ranked.
How to minimize indexing problems?
To address indexing issues and minimize problems, aim to do the following on your website:
- Minimize URL and site errors.
- Avoid significant duplication of content via canonicalization or crafting keyword-rich, unique page content, title tags and meta descriptions. And
- Avoid blocking search engines’ access to content by checking for noindex tags within your HTML or disallow rules within your robots.txt file.
Google Search Console’s Index Coverage report highlights pages that have been discovered but not indexed, and provides reasons why this has happened.
After you have resolved any issues, you can request indexing through Google Search Console to speed up the process of robots coming back to your specific pages. There are two key ways to do this in Search Console:
- The URL Inspection Tool (for individual URLs)
- XML Sitemap submission (for multiple URLs)
Consequences of blocked resources
Googlebot is the name of Google’s crawler. It wants to see the exact same content that a user sees.
On-page content that is rendered via client-side resources like JavaScript can be difficult for Googlebot to read, depending on the implementation. Google uses a process called second wave of indexing, which crawls and indexes the HTML first. It returns to render the JavaScript after it has been fully loaded. Sometimes, it misses the JavaScript content.
If you block resources like JavaScript, CSS, or imagery, useful content may be ignored or discounted. As such, minimize the use of client-side rendered content on your website (if possible) and do not disallow JavaScript, CSS or image resources in your robots.txt file.
Back to TopNikki Lam
Nikki Lam is Senior Director of SEO at Neil Patel Digital, where she oversees the Organic Search offering, leads a growing team of over 20 passionate Search strategists, and assists in award-winning SEO campaigns for NP’s growing roster of enterprise and Fortune 1000 clients.
Matthew Santos
Matthew Santos is the Vice President of Products & Strategy at Neil Patel Accel. He initially built the four major product offerings they provide to customers, and continues to oversee three of those: SEO, CRO, and Email Marketing. He has been in the industry for almost 10 years, primarily focused on Earned Media digital tactics.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
