If not resolved, indexation issues can significantly hinder Google’s (Googlebot’s) ability to crawl your pages, negatively impacting your business’s organic SEO, potentially across a few pages or even the entire website!

Technical SEO

Some businesses only focus on writing content marketing and building backlinks until they are blue in the face.
Now, don’t get us wrong—these are still some of the most important ranking factors out there today; however, sometimes businesses overlook the importance of their website’s crawlability.

This article will explain why Google must be able to crawl your website and address any indexation problems you may encounter.

First things first, what are crawlability problems?

Your main pages or your blog posts, which you have been writing diligently for the last day or two that appear in Google’s results, must be able to get indexed.

It’s a bit like a large store that, let’s say, that is selling furniture. For that business to sell the item to you, it must first be scanned into the warehouse and tell the infantry control software to show that item is in stock.

This is similar to how Google’s algorithm works, once the page is indexed, Googlebot displays the page within the SERP’s.

For that, the Googlebot needs to crawl the page, and there are many ways to send a page for indexation: either manually submitting it via Google Search Console or by leaving Googlebot to find it.

However, if there are indexation issues, Googlebot will not be able to crawl and index the page blog post.

Googlebot can usually crawl and index pages on its own accord

Often, you don’t need to do anything to get a page indexed; you just need to simply add a site map and submit this to Google.

Often, it’s a Googlebot that can crawl and index the page without you having to do anything.

However, indexation problems can occur because of a no-index tab being left on or the page possibly sometimes being too slow for the Googlebot to index it. For instance, if the ‘no index’ tag is mistakenly applied to a page, it will not be indexed. Similarly, if a page takes too long to load, Googlebot may not index it.

No index tabs being left on incorrectly

Sometimes, no index tab can be left on, so “no-index” code might be written in the website’s header section, preventing the Googlebot from crawling that page. If this occurs, that page will never appear in Google’s results.

Incomplete indexing

incomplete indexing is when some pages are indexed, and others are not. This can occur for a range of different reasons. However, the web developers and your SEO team must use various tools, such as Screaming Frog to find which pages are getting indexed and which are not. Then, it’s a matter of correcting the problems; it could be that they are “orphan pages”, that is, pages with no links leading to it. There can be a considerable amount of 404 errors, and there could not possibly be no-index code written into the website’s header section within the robot.txt document.

Unreliable hosting

It can sometimes be the case that you employ an absolutely fantastic SEO team that got that business on the first page of Google.co.uk, possibly even in the number one position. However, if the hosting is unreliable, and the website is down for a long time regularly, perhaps due to server maintenance, probably because the hosting company is unreliable, or because the server is so slow, then Google might decide to drop that page out of its index.

No index code is written in the robots.txt document

The robots.txt provides instructions for the Googlebot on whether to crawl and index that page. However, if you get these instructions wrong, for example you tell Google to “no-index” a critical page, such as the homepage, then can’t get indexed, massively hampering your business’s organic SEO performance.

Do use of the Google Search Console it is brilliant. It is free and can show you some of your websites indexation issues.

Google Search Console and indexing errors

Your SEO consultant or in-house marketing team should routinely check for any indexing errors within your Google Search Console account.

For example, it could be the case that all the pages were getting indexed up until one week ago.

Yet the website might have gone through a redesign process recently. and your web designers have written in the code which now means some pages can’t get indexed, so this needs to be fixed if you want those pages to be indexed later.

Many SEO agencies use Screaming Frog

A lot of SEO agencies across the globe use Screaming Frog to find things like 404-page errors, for example.
An increase number of 404-pages and 404-page errors can massively impact your business’s SEO.

For example, your SEO consultant might have spent hundreds of hours building high-quality do follow links to send link equity link juice to that specific page. Then, if you decide to delete that page all of that link, equity can be lost overnight.

There’s also the matter of creating a poor user experience.

Shoppers will likely bounce off the website immediately if a custom 404 page greets them. Therefore, you should work closely with your web design and SEO teams to correct 404-page errors.

5xx Errors

A 5xx error signals that the server couldn’t carry out a request. Googlebot must be able to crawl and index the page, so the 5xx error could prevent . Googlebot from doing its work. If this happens that page might be removed and ranked lower in Google’s index.

504 Gateway Timeout:

504 Gateway Timeout: if your website is timing out, then this again can cause indexation issues, as again, the bot can’t access that page to crawl and index it.

Broken internal links

Internal links are a bit like a spider’s cobweb; you can follow them, and everything is interlinked.
However, if the links become broken, that’s to say a page that links directly to a different blog post which you have just written, if that link becomes a broken internal link. This will prevent Googlebot from following the link and then crawling that page, so broken internal links can waste your business’s crawl budget.