Why is my website not being indexed in search results?

Indexing is a key part of search engine algorithms, in that it is the process that leads to a website being listed in search results. As search engines want to make sure the information they show to searchers is up to date, indexing is crucial, but what does this mean and how does it work?

What is indexing?

Indexing is one of the first steps in the process of how search engines rank and serve search results. Once search engine algorithms have crawled your website, the next step is indexing. Indexing is adding your website to the search engine, allowing Google and others to decide where to rank your website in search results.

What should I do if my website isn’t being indexed?

One of the main reasons I’ve noticed that has resulted in websites not being indexed in search results is that the pages are no-indexed, or search engine bots are being blocked in a website’s robots.txt file.

You can check if a site is no-indexed by right clicking on the website and clicking ‘View source’ and searching for the below:

If within the ‘content’ section it says ‘no-index’, this means that search engines won’t be able to index your website. Simply change this to ‘index’.

Another reason why your website might not be indexed is that the robots.txt file is blocking crawlers. Go to www.[yourdomain].com/robots.txt to check this, and make sure this file doesn’t have:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This means that no crawler or bot can crawl your website, your site can’t be crawled by search engines, and therefore won’t be indexed. Luckily, the solution is simple – just delete the stroke (/) after ‘Disallow:’.

If your website is brand new, it can take Google around four days before it indexes your website. In a future blog, we’ll explore how you can get your pages indexed more quickly.

Are you looking to grow your business in 2023? Get in touch with our friendly team at Engage Web and we can develop a digital marketing strategy to help your website get results.

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Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

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