Indexation issues can cause website problems and drop your rankings. These 11 tips will help you improve your indexation.
SEO has many moving parts. It often feels like we can’t stop optimizing one section of a website until we get to the next.
After some SEO experience, you may feel you can spend less time fixing things.
Indexability, Craw Budgets are two possible examples of these things. However, forgetting them would be a mistake.
I like always to say that indexability issues are a website that isn’t in its own way. That website is telling Google not to rank its pages because they don’t load correctly, or redirect too often.
You might be wrong if you believe you don’t have the time or resources to fix your site’s indexability.
Indexability issues can lead to a drop in rankings and a rapid decline in site traffic.
Crawling budgets must be considered.
This post will provide 11 tips for improving the indexability of your website.
Jump To:
- Track Crawl Status With Google Search Console
- Create mobile-friendly webpages
- Update Content
- Submit a Sitemap to Each Search Engine
- Optimize your Interlinking Scheme
- Deep Links To Isolated Websites
1. Google Search Console - Track Crawl Status
Your crawl status may be showing signs of a more significant problem.
It is crucial to check your crawl status every 30-60 days to spot potential problems affecting your site’s overall marketing performance.
It is the very first step in SEO. Without it, all other efforts will be futile.
You can check your crawl status in the index tab’s sidebar.
You can now tell the Search console to block access to a specific webpage. This can be useful when a page has been temporarily redirected or a 404 error.
The 410 parameters will permanently delete a page from the index.
Common Crawl Errors & Solutions
A crawl error on your website can be a sign of more serious technical problems.
These are the most common errors that I see in crawling:
- DNS errors.
- Server errors.
- Robots.txt errors.
- 404 errors.
It will appear you how Google views your website.
Your DNS provider may need to resolve a DNS problem that causes a page not to be correctly retrieved and rendered.
To resolve a server error, you must diagnose the problem. These are the most common errors:
- Timeout.
- Refusal to connect
- Connect failed.
- Connect timeout.
- No response.
A server error is typically temporary. However, if you have a persistent problem, it may be necessary to contact your hosting provider.
Robots.txt errors could pose a more significant problem for your site. Search engines may be unable to find your robots.txt file if it returns a 200 or 404 error.
You can submit a robots.txt websitemap, or you could opt to avoid it altogether by opting to manually remove any index pages that may be problematic for your crawl.
These errors can be quickly fixed so that your pages will be crawled and indexed when search engines revisit your site.
2. Mobile-Friendly Websites
We must optimize our pages for mobile-friendly display on the mobile-first index.
If a mobile-friendly copy is unavailable, a desktop copy can still be indexed and displayed under the mobile index. Your rankings could suffer.
Many technical adjustments can make your website mobile-friendly instantly, including:
- Implementing responsive website design.
- Insert the viewpoint meta tag into content
- Minimizing on-page resources (CSS or JS).
- Tag pages using the AMP cache
- Image optimization and compression for faster loading times
- Reduce the size of UI elements on-page
Make sure you test your website on a smartphone platform before running it through Google PageSpeed Insights. This is still the best tip. Submit a sitemap through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
By tagging each page with duplicate content, you can create an XML sitemap generator or manually in Google Search Console.
3. Optimize your Interlinking Program
Establishing a consistent information structure is essential to ensure that your website is indexed correctly and properly organized.
Search engines can also be helped by creating main service categories that allow related pages to sit.
4. Deep Link to Isolated Websites
You can have a page on your website or subdomain indexed if it is not crawlable because of an error or isolation.
This strategy is especially effective for promoting new content on your site and getting it indexed faster.
Search engines might not recognize syndicated content, which could lead to duplicate pages if it isn’t correctly canonicalized.
5. Increase Load Times & Minify on-page Resources
Search engines (SE) will not index your site if they are forced to crawl large, unoptimized images.
Some backend elements may also be difficult to crawl by search engines. Google, for example, has struggled historically to crawl JavaScript.
Flash and CSS are not always the best resources for mobile devices. This can cause your crawl budget to be strained.
It’s a losing situation in which page speed and crawl budget get sacrificed to accommodate intrusive elements on the pages.
Optimize your webpage speed, particularly over mobile devices, by optimizing on-page resources such as CSS. You can enable caching or compression to make it easier for spiders to crawl your site.
6. Fix Pages with Noindex Tags
It may be a good thought to use a noindex tag for duplicated pages or only intended for users who perform a specific action during the development of your website.
However, it is possible to identify websites with noindex tags using an online tool such as Screaming Frog.
Yoast is a WordPress plugin that permit you to switch pages from index to non-index. This can also be done manually from the backend pages of your website.
7. Set A Custom Crawl Rate
If Google’s spiders are adversely impacting your site, you can adjust the speed of your crawl rate in the older version of Google Search Console.
If your website is undergoing significant redesigns or migrations, this gives you time to make any necessary changes.
8. Eliminate duplicate content
Duplicate content can slow down your crawl speed and increase your crawl budget.
Either blocking pages can eliminate these problems from being indexed or placing a Canonical Tag on the page you want to be indexed.
Like the previous point, search engines won’t mistake similar pages for duplicate content if they optimize each page’s meta tags.
9. You Do Not Want Spiders to Crawl on Your Block Pages
You may want to stop search engines crawling a particular page in some instances. These are the methods you can use to do this:
- Place an index Tag.
- Place the URL in a robots.txt document
- You can delete the entire page.
This will allow your crawls to run more efficiently and not force search engines through duplicate content.
Conclusion
How well you keep up with your SEO will determine the state of your website’s crawlability issues.
These issues could have been identified if you constantly tinkered with the backend. This may be a sign that you are affecting your rankings.
You can run a quick Google Search Console scan if you aren’t sure.
These results can be very educational.
