10 Reasons Why Your Site Isn’t Indexing

1) Sitemaps

Have you checked your sitemaps submitted in Webmaster Tools? If not, check to make sure you have the newest version of your sitemap.  If need be resubmit your sitemap.

2) Robots.txt

This file is in your websites root folder. If the user agent is set to disallow / this means it is telling web crawlers to not index any of your websites content.

3) .htaccess

This file is in your public html folder. If you do not configure the file correctly you can be left with an infinite loop that will cause your site to never load.

4) Meta Tags

Do pages on your site have the <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> tag?  This is causing the tagged page to be no indexed with is a page attribute and links on the pages no followed which is a link attribute.

5) URL Parameters

Setting URL parameter for dynamic links tells Google which links you do not what to get indexed, but if done incorrectly can cause pages of your site being removed from Google’s index.

6) Lack of Domain Strength

Is your domain new? Does it have low domain authority?  Page rank still exists.  In theory the higher a site’s page ranks the higher the frequency of crawls.

7) Bad Redirects

Have you updated the URLs on your pages or ported content over without redirect considerations?  This is often the culprit.

8) DNS Issues

If you are making server side changes or your server is doing maintenance work, the DNS delegating can hold up the access to crawlers.

9) Duplicate Content

Are large parts of your site duplicate content?  Search engines want to present a rich experience to users and frown upon duplicate content.  They may not index your site in general or if  already indexed may drop it from their index over time.

10) Inherited Issues

Whenever you are taking a site over, launching on a new domain or redesigning, issues may arise that were caused by past actions.  You built a site for a client; the client picked the domain, as soon as you launched the site Google refuses to index your site.  Issues can arise like that domain incurring a penalty and being ditched by the previous owner which was bought by your client after the fact. In order to identify any existing issues you need to perform an audit.  More so a technical one but to be thorough you can also include an onsite, offsite, and conversion audit as well.