If your pages aren’t indexed, they’re not ranking. This underappreciated report in Search Console tells you exactly what’s wrong.
There’s a little gem in Google Search Console that too many of us overlook. I’ve mentioned it before, and readers who were around then probably took a peek, but haven’t gone back since.
It’s the ‘Why pages aren’t indexed’ report.
If our beautifully crafted content isn’t showing up in search, this may be the report that tells us why those pages are sitting on the sidelines. It can be found under ‘Indexing > Pages’.
Common culprits include:
- Crawled – currently not indexed (Google came. Google saw. Google said ‘meh’.)
- Discovered – currently not indexed (It’s on Google’s radar, but way down the to-do list.)
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical (Google’s confused, and now so are we.)
- Blocked by robots.txt (We told Google to ignore these. Did we mean to?)
If any of the reasons have a lot of pages, click on the ‘Reason’ and then ‘Export’ to get a list of pages affected. Each of these reasons will have different fixes, such as providing better links, putting more content on the page or getting the URLs right.
The ‘Why pages aren’t indexed’ report might not be the star of the show, but it’s definitely the stage manager making sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. Check it often. And each time, keep records of what it says, so you can see what’s changed.