With billions of websites and new ones being added every day, content becomes one of the most important factors in ranking your site against your competitors. Adding new content to your site should be a part of your overall marketing budget and weekly if not daily activities. New content shows your customers that you are relevant, and search engines including Google pick up on this new additional content on your website.
Google finds web pages (unique URLs) through links and XML sitemaps submitted to Google through Search Console. Google then crawls the web pages that it finds to determine the value of the content as it relates to web queries and other websites. Once this crawl has taken place, it indexes the pages based on those determinations.
What Does “Indexed Pages” Mean?
Indexed pages have been found by search crawlers and deemed to have enough quality for relevant search phrases. Indexed pages will show up in search results and can drive significant organic traffic to your site.
What Does “Non-Indexed pages” Mean?
Search engines don’t guarantee that they will crawl (or thus index) every URL of your website. If your website is new or you’ve recently added a lot of new pages to your site, those may not yet be indexed. With the tens of millions of domains out there, it takes search engines a while to crawl through and index each of them to best benefit search users. If you’ve recently added or updated your sitemap, give it time before new pages are indexed.
If it has been a while and Google still lists many of the pages in your sitemap as “non-indexed” there may be a bigger issue with either the quality of your pages or the structure of your sitemap.
Pages that Google will often not index include:
- Blog category pages
- Blog author pages
- Pages that are indexed under another domain (www.example.com and not example.com)
- Pages with 404/401 or server errors
- Pages with coding errors Low-quality pages or duplicate/identical content on different pages
How Can I Get More Pages Indexed?
First, ensuring that each page on your site has high-quality content that users will find valuable is the most important quotient. Above that, there are a few other items that should be considered such as:
- Include industry relevant content in each of your website’s pages
- Increase your website’s important by getting more links from industry sites
- Make your website pages easy for Google to find and crawl
- Submit your updated sitemaps to Google Search Console
- Focus on creating and distributing remarkable content through social media channels
Kirk Communications, a web design and development and SEO company, can help your business generate more qualified leads and design the best digital strategy for your business. Call us at 603-828-6850 for more information!