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What is Indexability in SEO?
Indexability in SEO is the ability of search engines, like Google, to access, crawl, and add your website’s pages to their index, which is like a database where search engines store and catalog information gathered from websites.
When a page is indexed, it becomes eligible to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines rely on bots (crawlers) to navigate websites through their links and collect information about the content.
Indexability depends on several factors, including your site’s structure, the use of directives through meta tags and robots.txt, the quality of your content, and the presence of technical issues such as broken links or slow loading speeds. Making your pages accessible and ensuring search engines recognize them is critical for driving organic traffic and improving your website’s overall SEO performance.
Why is Indexability for Websites Important?
Indexability determines whether search engines can include your pages in their search results. If your pages aren’t indexable, they won’t appear in search results, leading to missed opportunities for visibility and traffic.
No matter how high-quality or informative your content may be, you won’t rank for your target keywords without indexed pages. Ensuring indexability directly impacts your ability to attract organic traffic and improve your site’s performance.
Risks of Indexability Errors
Indexability errors can lead to dropped or missing pages in search results. The impact of unintentionally making pages non-indexable can reach far beyond the affected pages over time – damaging the authoritativeness and performance of your website as a whole. Overlooking indexability hurts both visibility and long-term SEO growth.
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Common Indexability Issues & How to Resolve Them
A page’s indexability can be impacted by many factors. Here are some of the most common things we monitor for to ensure pages are able to be indexed.
Blocked URLs By Robots.txt
Robots.txt files are added to websites to serve as a directive for search engines when crawling. It can be used to allow or disallow specific crawlers, called user agents, from crawling specific pages or sections of your website.
If not handled with care, you can unintentionally block search engine crawlers from accessing important URLs. This often happens with site migrations post-relaunch when directories are left disallowed or by making rules too broad and accidentally including more pages in rules than intended.
Solution: Review your robots.txt file, which you can access by entering it in a browser after your domain (https://example.com/robots.txt). You can also use Google Search Console or third-party robots.txt tester tools to check specific URLs.
NoIndex Meta Tags
NoIndex meta tags instruct search engines not to index specific pages. These tags can specify if you want the links on the page to be followed as well, among other things. By default, pages are “index, follow”, so if the tags on your page are empty, that is okay. You can specify “index” if desired, which is especially recommended after correcting an accidental “noindex” tag, to communicate intentionality with the update.
Solution: If you’ve found a page that has a “noindex” tag that should not be there, you will want to update this tag in the <head> of your page’s source code. Most CMS options will handle this easily with a checkbox in the settings of the page or post you’re editing.
Unoptimized XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps guide search engines to important pages. Common problems include outdated entries or omitted pages. Most CMS options handle sitemaps dynamically, so website owners do not have to manually generate and upload them with new publishing or changes. Many SEO plugins or add-ons can handle this as well.
Solution: If your XML sitemap is not up to date, contains pages that should be omitted, or is missing pages that should be included, check your CMS for sitemap settings to determine how they’re created.
- If it is dynamically generated, you should be able to modify your settings there in your CMS or plugin.
- If it is manually generated, we would recommend looking into plugins for a dynamic solution.
Then, once your XML sitemap is updated, submit sitemaps in search engine tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for verification and efficient index reporting.
Internal Linking Issues & Orphan Pages
Poor internal linking creates difficult navigation for crawlers to find content quickly, or in some cases – orphan pages – which are URLs that are entirely unlinked to from other URLs, making them inaccessible to crawlers.
Solution: Ensure all key site pages are linked from other indexed pages. Audit the site structure to identify unlinked URLs, and incorporate dynamic linking strategies for large-scale sites, like eCommerce platforms.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content confuses search engines and can dilute link value and ranking signals. Common causes include multiple URLs containing identical content, disorganized content strategy planning, or technical issues creating multiple indexable versions of a URL.
Solution: Implement 301 (permanent) redirects wherever content consolidation should take place and ensure all internal links are updated accordingly. If multiple versions of a webpage are necessary for user experience, legal, or other reasons – canonical tags can be used to indicate the preferred version of the page for search engines to index.
Low Quality Content
Thin or irrelevant content reduces the likelihood of indexing and can sometimes result in what’s referred to as a “soft 404”. Pages with minimal value, like duplicate product descriptions, perform poorly in SERPs.
Solution: Audit your site’s content to identify low quality pages and prioritize getting them revised. Refresh outdated content with detailed, unique information. Invest in creating high-quality, user-focused material for critical pages. (we can help with that!)
Pagespeed Performance
Slow load times and pagespeed metrics can also hurt crawling and indexing. Factors like large, uncompressed image files or poor server response times play a role, among other technical factors.
Solution: Use tools like Google’s Lighthouse or Page Speed Insights to identify page performance errors and opportunities for improvement. Optimize images, implement caching, and upgrade hosting if necessary to improve load times and enhance crawler accessibility. These kind of errors typically do require a bit more in-depth technical knowledge.
How to Monitor Indexability for Website Health
Regular monitoring and using the right tools simplifies identifying and fixing indexability issues. SEO tools help diagnose problems like duplicate content, broken links, and noindex directives.
Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools
These tools provided directly from major search engines are great because it provides insight into exactly what the search engines are seeing and indexing based on. It provides reports on crawl errors, excluded pages, and performance metrics. Use the URL Inspection tool to verify and request indexing for specific URLs if they’ve been updated.
Regular Website Audits
On top of continuous monitoring practices, we recommend a full website audit every 6 months or so, depending on how frequently and significantly your website changes. Any good SEO audit should check for indexability to ensure that key pages are most easily accessible and indexable to search engines. Our Website Health Scan is a great way to quickly get a pulse on your site’s indexability, among many other technical SEO factors.
Ensure Effective Internal Linking & XML Sitemaps
As you modify, remove, and expand the content on your site, it’s critical to implement effective internal linking and keep the XML sitemap current. These are main sources of search engines identifying new and updated content to index and rank.
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