Google Likely to Index Important Content

Google's John Mueller discussed how important it is to help Google determine important Google SEO content, making it easier to index. While he acknowledged the role of external links, his response emphasised the value of SEO content importance and shared five ways to help the search engine recognise such content on a website.

URL Discovered but Not Indexed

A person told Mueller that they were producing content for clients; however, Google's search console claims that it has been discovered but not indexed. "Not indexed" implies that Google did not index the content for ranking consideration. Not indexed content might as well not exist from the search engine's perspective.

The person then asked Mueller for suggestions, and he responded by sharing insights and information about external links.

Crawled but Not Indexed

The person asking the question was curious about content that had been crawled or discovered but not indexed. They think that Google sees the content as unsuitable for indexing.

Mueller explained that Google's decision not to index the content does not always mean that there is an issue with the content.

Google Content Indexing

Mueller said that many site owners and publishers are always quick to assume that Google does not index their content because of a problem. He then explained why the search engine does not automatically index everything.

For instance, while Google's crawlers are still crawling web pages, it does not necessarily mean that they will include it in their index. Mueller said that site owners and publishers should consider those two categories of not indexed as the same thing. Moreover, it can be tricky since Google does not index everything, so this scenario can definitely happen.

Getting Content Indexed Faster

The person who posed the question said there was a consistent pattern of content not being indexed on five to six client websites. He asked Mueller's help on what to do to ensure that their Google SEO content would get indexed.

Mueller offered several suggestions, even if the person might be already implementing those best practices. Nevertheless, he wanted to ensure that SEOs make it easy for Google to identify the important content on a website.

Sometimes, it means that SEOs should make less but better content, focusing on a few pages to be indexed. Mueller also said that Google uses internal linking to find significant content on a website.

For instance, if a site owner or publisher links from the homepage, that means they care about these pages, so Google sees them as valuable. External links fall into this category as Google sees that people think these pages are essential; therefore, the search engine will treat them as important as well.

Then, from a technical point of view, RSS feeds and site maps help Google better comprehend whether these pages are new or have recently changed. The search engine would then review them again to see what's new. However, all these things are connected, and it's rare to have a scenario where there's only one thing that an SEO is missing to get their pages indexed.

The person then asked a follow-up question about how external links help their pages get indexed. They said that they are using blog posts for interlinking with other web pages. The person asked if linking to those blog posts, which Google does not index, would affect their website ranking in any positive way.

SEOs understand how links improve a website's rank, so Mueller's response on this issue isn't particularly surprising. He emphasised that external links could help Google recognise the important SEO content on a website.

If Google comes across external links to those pages, then there is a higher chance that they would crawl and index that page. However, it all depends on the type of external links. Links from social media typically have a no-follow attribute, so Google does not really receive any signals from there.

If Google identifies that the links are not as useful or problematic, the search engine might also ignore them. However, if Google can tell that something is regarded as important, they will probably crawl and index the page further.

What most SEOs do not know is that Google forwards value to the rest of the website if they do not index that web page. If they choose to exclude the page from their index in this situation, it means that Google does not have a destination for those links, so they also cannot use any of those links for the rest of the website.

Important Content Will Most Likely Be Indexed

Mueller's answer revealed one of Google's methods when determining what to index. He did not reveal the algorithm, but he did offer important insights about indexing regarding the importance of a piece of content.

The major takeaway is to send signals to Google, helping the search engine understand which content is important. And to do this, a site owner or publisher should make important content.

Help Google Recognise Important Content

Mueller also gave five tips to help the search engine recognise important content. Below are the five ways to do just that:

1. Write less but better content
2. Use internal links to send signals to Google
3. Link from the homepage
4. Add external links to signal that a piece of content is important
5. Utilise RSS feeds and site maps to help Google find essential content

Creating relevant content that is important to readers in some way is a tried-and-true method for increasing the likelihood of external links and general interest in the website.

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