Why are some pages crawled but not indexed by Google?
What do crawling and indexing mean in the SEO world? A web page would undergo two processes to appear on a search engine results page; crawling and indexing. Search engines first recognize the website by sending a bot or other crawlers to discover what is on the page; This is called crawling.
After the site is crawled, if it deems worthy of being found in search results, it will be indexed, which means the crawlers store and categorize the content on the website and make it ready to be displayed in SERPs. Also, any backlinks on the indexed page are now scheduled for crawling by the Google bot. Keep scrolling down the article to learn more such insights.
The site must first be crawled and then indexed to be found in a query from any search engine; This does not mean that every site that gets crawled will be indexed, but every indexed site is crawled. There are also times when a website is crawled by Google bot or crawler but not indexed, thus not appearing in the SERPs. So, excluded in the Google search console, these web pages fall under the status type ‘Crawled-Currently Not Indexed’. Here are some reasons why these pages are not being indexed by Google and included in search results :
Lack of value – Google’s algorithm decides not to index a specific page if it understands that a particular page or your website is not important to show in search results for users. Still, it might re-evaluate the page next time it crawls again.
Relevance – Another common reason is if Google is unsure about the relevance of the content of your website while crawling, then the page may not get indexed.
Internal duplicate content – It is a risk to any SEO. If you have a particular page with a large ratio of exactly similar content with another page on your website, then this could also be one reason for your page not getting indexed.
Internal links – Google crawls the website to find links either on the site or to an external site. So, pages without internal links are termed as orphaned pages and could be a reason for not getting indexed.
Sitemap – It is the map of your website where all the links and titles of the website are recorded. Providing a sitemap is necessary as the crawlers use it to locate content and information on the site.
Other reasons include the privacy settings that could be on, the site is blocked using robots.txt, or they might be noindex meta tags.
Finally, the first step to fix the indexing issue is to diagnose and figure out the problem. The above-organized list will help you do that.
If the website is not optimized correctly, important pages may not be indexed. This will negatively impact the SEO rankings, leading to decreased rankings and visibility of the website in SERPs.
Therefore make sure that the next time Google crawls the page, you are providing fresh SEO-rich content with quality pages and internal links in order to get organic traffic and good SEO ranking in the search results.
TAKE AWAY
Indexation is the first step in SEO. Having your page crawled does not mean your page will be indexed, as indexing is done based on various factors that ultimately make up the entire business of SEO.
The ‘Crawled – Currently Not Indexed’ status does not require immediate action unless the site’s important web pages are found here. However, it helps identify which part of the website seems to be ignored by the search engine.
To watch the latest Google SEO Office Hours, please check out the video below:
Durga
About The Author…
Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.