3 Significant Reasons Why the Number of Indexed Pages are Going Down

The decreasing number of indexed web pages by Google and other search engines is a major challenge. If you wish to get any organic traffic to your website from Google, then getting your website indexed is one of the most vital SEO tasks. If such a thing happens, you need to fix this issue at the earliest otherwise no user would find your website or content as it will not be a part of Google’s search index. You should start by identifying the indexing issue. If your website is new or has issues regarding technical SEO or content, then these can be a major reason for the limited number of indexed web pages. 

For attaining a rank on the SERPs, getting more number of indexed web pages is important as well as essential. Web pages not getting indexed by Google can be a sign that either Google is not liking your page or may not be able to crawl it with ease. We understand your concern and so, here, we will discuss the 3 main reasons why Google may not index your website. 

• The Loading Time of Your Page is Slow
  
  

Your website needs to produce a 200 (OK) server response code to get indexed by any search engine.

• Internal and External Duplicate Content Issue
  
  

This issue can confuse the search engines and result in decreased indexed URLs. 301 and canonicalization can be the solutions.

• Change in the Structure of the URL
  
  

A change in the domain, subdomain, or folder can take place due to a modification in the CMS, server setting, or backend programming and this can change the site’s URL.

Some other common reasons might be that your website has been penalized by Google; your web pages have been found to be irrelevant by Google; Google is not being able to crawl the web pages, etc. Let’s discuss some of these common reasons in brief - 

• Your website is new, unproven, and Google hasn’t found it yet
  
  

If your website is new, you have to give it some time to get indexed and also, ensure that your sitemap is created and submitted.

• The website or some pages have been blocked with robots.txt
  
  

It may happen if your editor or developer blocks your site with robots.txt. Not to worry as you can easily fix it by removing the entry from the robots.txt and make your website reappear in the index.

• Having a sitemap.xml is vital
  
  

A sitemap.xml is a list of directions that guides Google to index your website. In the case of indexation issues, you should revise and resubmit the sitemap.xml.

• Check the crawl errors
  
  

If Google is not able to crawl some pages on your website, it will not index them. You need to identify these crawl errors and diagnose the unindexed pages.

So, these were some of the main factors behind the decrease in the number of website indexing by Google and the measures that you can take to fix the issues.