John Mueller Gives Tips For Indexing Websites

Website SEO companies do everything in their power to get their websites indexed and boost their rankings on the search engine results pages. But for some businesses and webmasters whose pages were not being indexed, Google’s John Mueller gave specific diagnostic tips and insights that can help improve website SEO.

The discussion was brought up when an e-commerce publisher – before asking his question – shared that his web pages were not being indexed. According to Mueller, Google just needs a bit of encouragement to index a whole website.

Website Inadequately Indexed

The site publisher explained his situation in detail. They said that their e-commerce website, which has less than 500 product pages, took longer to index. When they checked the site through site colon, the report showed that it only had three to five pages despite having 170 valid pages in Search Console. They added that this situation has been going on for months, and they have no idea how to solve the problem.

Mueller replied, addressing the shortcomings of the site colon search. He said that SEOs should not use the site/colon query to diagnose websites because it is not specifically designed for such a purpose. Therefore, people should not be surprised when they see different numbers.

He also went on to say that the numbers Google shows in the site query result are optimised for speed but are not optimised to be comprehensive.

Next, Mueller gave some helpful tips on diagnosing specific tests and analysing website SEO. Generally, if the website has about 500 pages but only 100 of them are indexed several months after, it only requires minimal extra effort for the situation to improve.

Mueller told the site publisher to check the technical side of things before anything else. Doing so ensures that everything is in place and confirms that the site is well-optimised before Google or other search engines crawl its web pages. He also said that SEOs could look for website crawling tools, which are mostly free for smaller sites. With such tools, it is easier for someone to figure out if their website is crawlable or not.

After determining that the website is indeed crawlable, Mueller then explained the importance of site promotion, especially for smaller websites that need to be indexed. He said that businesses and site owners could encourage their target audience to click through links and visit their websites, perhaps by working with other webmasters or by buying advertisements.

For small local businesses and e-commerce websites, Mueller advised searching for local chambers of commerce that may be interested in linking to the site to provide pieces of useful information.

When site owners do this, it shows Google’s systems that this new website is a legitimate small business. As a result, Google would be encouraged to index each and every one of its webpages. Moreover, if a smaller website containing only less than a hundred pages gains visitors and clicks, search engines will believe it is a useful and legitimate site.

But for an e-commerce website with over 500,000 pages, it is a completely different story whether Google indexes all of those web pages or not.

The site publisher threw in one more question that changed the whole picture. They confessed that they have previously noindexed the e-commerce site in January, which resulted in hundred errors in Search Console.

Businesses and website owners use the noindex tag on a web page to tell search engines that they do not want this piece of content to show up in search results. The noindex tag is commonly used for duplicate content, outdated content, web pages with little to no content, and the like. In the site publisher’s case, they referred to it as “unwanted pages”, which is why they noindexed it.

The person then added that they had removed the noindex a few months ago from the product pages, but afterwards, its validation kept on failing in Google Search Console.

With this, Mueller said that the quick transition from noindexing context to getting them indexed could be the very reason why Google refuses to index some of the site publisher’s web pages. He also noted that the validation failing does not mean that the search engine is incompetent in indexing web pages. Rather, it is the search engine’s way to send a message to the publisher.

According to Mueller, Search Console could be confused because the site publisher implicated that they have handled the problem well, but nothing was actually fixed.

Mueller Recommends Promoting The Website To Get It Indexed

Mueller said that changing the noindex status to index may even cause bigger problems and slow things down since it had been several months since the website owner removed the noindex. He then advised the publisher to improve their site promotion and get their social media followers to follow suit. Mueller added that it doesn’t take that much effort to get Google to index smaller websites such as the one in question.

Site Promotion And Indexing

There are different ways to promote a website and get Google to include it in its site index. For one, guest blogging – which works by writing for other blogs and linking to them – is an all-in-one method that improves a site’s online presence.

Answering questions on online forums is also a great way to build referral traffic, especially if site owners find the right questions and provide answers that are truly relevant to the questions being asked.

On the other hand, others opt for search engine optimisation that involves writing relevant and compelling content, optimising web pages, and building links.

No matter type of promotional endeavour you want to adopt for your website, it is best done with the help of a trustworthy website SEO company.

If you’re looking to work with the best SEO professionals in the UK, Position1SEO is your best choice. Our team can create content that perfectly represents your brand and products and optimise your web pages to ensure that it is crawlable for Google and other search engines.

You can also select any keyword at any competition level, and with your chosen key phrases, we will give your search rankings and site traffic a boost – and all these come with zero risks! Moreover, you are guaranteed to secure the top position on Google Page 1 without overly exhausting your funds as we provide you with an affordable SEO package that is entirely bespoke, depending on your site’s specific needs.

If you want to give our services a try, just call 0141 846 0114 or e-mail office@position1seo.co.uk today. We offer a free no-obligation quote and SEO audit.