Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Ruben Nunez on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 11/11/2021).

What is the process that I need to take to get my pages indexed?

Hi Guys. I have a question about indexing. I recently created a site, and I`ve submitted my site map. The problem is, google search console is showing me that only a small portion of my site is indexed. My most important, content rich pages are not indexed at all.I see it says "Discovered - currently not indexed" status Excluded.What is the process that I need to take to hopefully get my pages indexed?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Brenda Malone: Is your site very large? If so, just wait for Google to come back and visit those pages.

    IF your site is small (under 500-1000 pages), and this notice persists for the same number of pages, then evaluate the quality of your content — it could be that Google doesn`t think it`s not worthy of their time. The confusing thing about this status is that any content quality issues aren`t limited to the listed URLs, it could be a site-wide issue.

  • Brenda Malone: What does a site: search show?

  • Ruben Nunez: Brenda Malone how do I run that search. is it site:URL ? When I do that I only see 2 of my own pages in the site results.

  • Daniel Dutton: Brenda Malone agree with everything here. Either the content is poor and Google doesn`t deem it worth indexing or, more likely as its a new site, you just have to wait. In the meantime, you could improve your content and resubmit to try and speed the process up.

  • Josh Levenson: Are they linked to internally. Is decent quality content. Google doesn`t like to showcase poor quality content.

  • Ruben Nunez: high quality content (all well written and researched) and since most of it is blog / articles, its found both on my homepage feed and on the blog page itself.

  • Michael Zittel: Do you have canonical tags set? Share a URL of the EXCLUDED page and the wizards will take a look.

  • Ruben Nunez: I don`t know exactly what that means.

  • Michael Zittel: Ruben Nunez In Google search console, I believe it will show you what url was EXCLUDED. Share that with the group. The SEO "wizards" will take a look and hopefully help you out.

  • Ruben Nunez: I see. Let me post that in the main tread.

  • Ruben Nunez: Thanks guys. Its not a large site. Under 100 pages. Its high quality content that I know would rank very highly for my keywords. I`m an "expert" in that field the site is focusing on, and the content is well researched. Yes, its linked internally, and the majority are blog articles that are linked from both a homepage blog feed and the blog page. I purposely left out my URL, but I can add it here if you guys think I should.

  • Ruben Nunez: My url is https://motuvintagevariants.com. Its all about technical toy info about a particular toy line I`m into.

    From there, every single article is "excluded". So everything here shows as excluded in search console:https://motuvintagevariants.com/blogs/mvv

    And 2 pages that I`ve spent ages working on to get right are also completely excluded:https://motuvintagevariants.com/pages/figure-checklisthttps://motuvintagevariants.com/pages/mini-comic-checklist

    Can you guys help figure out if there`s something I`m totally missing or something broken that is making google not index my most important pages?

    MOTUVINTAGEVARIANTS.COMMotu Vintage VariantsMotu Vintage Variants

  • Syed Saiful Islam: Ruben Nunez I analyze your website it has some errors to fix until you don`t fix those errors your website will never be indexed by Google.

  • Ruben Nunez: Syed Saiful Islam can you be specific? What errors do you see?

  • Josh Levenson: Maybe give it some more time. Your blog is indexed. I might try adding a sentence or two at the op of your /pages*. Just a hunch. Love the HeMan flashbacks from childhood.

  • Ruben Nunez: Thanks Josh. My hope is exactly that. That the site is new and I just need to give it time to let google run its course. Can you clarify what you mean about adding a sentence or two on the op? Would you mean making the opening paragraph a bit longer?

  • Josh Levenson: Exactly. Right before you get into the countries. Like I said, just a hunch. Dont` be afraid of linking out either. Good luck.

  • Ruben Nunez: Josh Levenson thanks!

  • Buth Main: I`ve noticed that indexing takes a bit more time than a few months ago. So, I think you need to wait 1-2 weeks. There are many ways to drive the referral traffic, if you need that.Also, Googlers says that it can be related to "a site quality". But they don`t provide the detailed info or definition of a website quality. I worked with a website in a similar niche and your site looks good at first glance.

  • Ruben Nunez: Thanks. I`ve been driving quite a bit of referral traffic by publishing links to new posts in FB groups that are part of my niche. I`ve noticed how google analytics does have bumps that appear on those days when I do post something new. Thanks for your suggestions on waiting it out. I think that seems to be what I need to do.

  • Ammon Johns: Buth Main it is not *just* quality, and there is no one single measure or metric involved. One of the major signals, of course, is link popularity, because high value links tend to be a signal of a quality page. However, other signals that a domain is especially important, or has temporarily become so can also figure highly, such as brand search, or a link trending in social media or hashtags, etc.

    If you want a more full breakdown of the factors and signals used, you should research "crawl priority" and "crawl prioritization" to learn more about how and why Google will use its crawler given that crawl resources are not infinite. Burstiness and trends in keywords in links to the page can make it get crawled at a higher priority than normal for instance, as breaking news or trends are things Google want to pick up extra quickly.

  • Jaroslaw Pidburskyj: I had a quick look at your homepage, it looks as your SEO is poor, you talk about the brand instead of the products you offer. Based on this result I suggest that you need to UP the SEO a on your pages if you want them indexed straightaway.

  • Ruben Nunez: Hi. thank you for reviewing the site. Your comment puzzles me a bit, since I don`t offer products. Its a purely informational site (I`m not looking to sell anything) with the purpose of offering in-depth, technical information about that particular vintage toy line.

  • Jaroslaw Pidburskyj: You only talk about the URL a instead of others things

  • Ruben Nunez: Jaroslaw Pidburskyj right. Vintage variants is the most important thing. Next to that, Ive highlighted the main place these variants come from such as leo, top toys, rotoplast, aurimat and congost.

  • Ammon Johns: Jaroslaw Pidburskyj quick thing here, we`re talking about the fact the pages haven`t been crawled, so what is *on* or *in* those pages wouldn`t be known or counted anyway. This is a crawl priority issue, and the fastest fix is to get some more links coming in, preferably ones earned by good content, but some leverage of brand wouldn`t be entirely wasted either (requesting links from suppliers, buyers, etc.).

  • Ruben Nunez: Just wanted to update you guys on the indexing progress. Google still has not indexed the blog pages or 2 of my main pages after a month of having them published, so I`m really hoping they will eventually get indexed.

    On a positive note, my site is already on the first page of google for my main keyword. I also really like that it shows my page nav links right in the search result:

  • Christine Hansen: Ruben Nunez Does your Google Search Console report any errors? If no errors I suspect thin content, perhaps you could elaborate on some of the most interesting prints from one country to another with close-up pictures and descriptions. It is definitely not a Google bot being late if a month went by.

  • Ruben Nunez: Christine Hansen It shows as 0 errors. It shows that google has discovered them but so far is refusing to crawl them. I don`t think they have thin content per se, but I can definitely make them more robust by adding more images. One of my pages I really want crawled has no images but lots of text content, and all my blog posts have only 1 image with 2-3 paragraphs of content each.

  • Christine Hansen: Ruben Nunez How odd. Btw you have only 28 pages on your website?! I wonder why you have a sitemap. When using sitemaps, a rule of thumb is that websites should be with more than 200 pages. Anything less, Google can handle. Also, I wonder what would happen if you published the articles in another system on another domain. If all else fails, I would definitely test that.

  • Ruben Nunez: Christine Hansen I built the website using shopify. Its an e-commerce platform that I choose, because I love the catalog system it has. Eventually, I want to have a "product-like" entry for around 275 items. For now, yeah, a little over 30 pages so far. With shopify, they create the sitemap automatically.

    I will say, since I did the internal links 4 days ago google has now indexed 3 of my blog entries. So I`m thinking they should be indexing the rest of my blog entries shortly.

  • Christine Hansen: Ruben Nunez Good news - Hope you get the rest in Google.

  • Taimoor Ahmed: Ruben Nunez hey RubenInterlink your not indexed pages with your main article which is already ranked and indexedAlso, interlink every not indexed article with already indexed pages

  • Christine Hansen: Taimoor Ahmed Do not ask people from this group to inbox you. If you have extra info, please leave it here - this way it will benefit more than just one.

  • Ruben Nunez: Taimoor Ahmed I think I know what you mean. Essentially link to content that is not indexed from pages that are indexed. That is a great idea and I can do it very naturally since I already referenced my blog content (i just dont currently link to it). Thanks for the idea!

  • Ruben Nunez: Hi Everyone. I just wanted to report my progress on my site. I`m currently #1 and #2 for my two main keywords in google so that`s really good news. My articles have also starting to gain quite a bit of traction with my audience which I promote (for free, not paid ads) on facebook and facebook groups I`m in.

    Bad news, my site which at this point has grown to 80 pages, has only 9 pages indexed. So they are indexing, but at a very very very slow pace.

  • Jaroslaw Pidburskyj: I have heard of something similar, all this guys keywords suddenly disappeared, checked his page and found something odd about the page, maybe yours is the same but cannot comment any further as the URL isn’t shown, it’s not your photography site.

  • Ruben Nunez: This is the site. No, not my photography page. https://motuvintagevariants.com

    MOTUVINTAGEVARIANTS.COMMotu Vintage Variants | Leo, Top Toys, Rotoplast, Aurimat, CongostMotu Vintage Variants | Leo, Top Toys, Rotoplast, Aurimat, Congost

  • Jaroslaw Pidburskyj: Have a look and review your H1, this is what I see and it’s repetitive 3 times, "Motu Vintage Variants Motu Vintage Variants Motu Vintage Variants". This could your why, but doesn’t talk about anything else. Google wants to see quality SEO from you to index from sitemap. You have wrapped the h1 around the logo but written it incorrectly. I thought it was something else but it wasn’t inputted so not what I thought. This page talks about the brand and nothing else. Maybe you have done the same with others.

  • Ruben Nunez: Jaroslaw Pidburskyj ok, I see the logo is wrapped in an h1 tag. I`ll need to change that site wide.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 11/11/2021).