One SEO professional submitted a question in the Question and Answer portion of a recent John Mueller hangout. They were concerned about possible low quality pages on their site.
They ended up publishing a landing page about a month ago, and it still hasn’t been indexed.
The professional performed tests with the live URL, including requesting indexing a few times.
They are aware that indexing doesn’t always happen quickly. However, this is the first time on their site that a landing page wasn’t indexed after a couple days.
They were wondering if there is something that they had missed.
They had also done all the checks they could find and ensured nothing was interfering with indexing, including Search Console checks.
They are at a loss as to why the new page would not be indexed.
John answered that, without knowing the individual URLs, it’s hard to say.
He mentioned that they don’t always index everything on the website. It’s entirely a common occurrence that for most websites, they index some part of the site, but not everything.
This is a possibility that they are seeing here.
Regarding the amount of content that they index from individual sites, sometimes this relies a bit on their understanding of the quality of the site itself.
If Google believes that it’s a high-quality and important site, then perhaps they will crawl and index that content as quickly as they can.
Of course, there is no guarantee there.
From that perspective, it’s tricky to see exactly what’s happening here.
John recommended posting in the help forum, just to ensure there are no technical issues holding the URL back.
John also recommended giving the URL a bit more time or seeing what they can do, overall, to improve the quality of the site in general.
This is something that’s going to be long-term, instead of something that is a fast tweak, in the hopes that Google picks it up.
This happens at approximately the 35:56 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
We published a landing page about a month ago and it hasn’t been indexed yet. I tested with the live URL and requested indexing a few times. I understand indexing doesn’t always happen quickly.
But this is the first time a landing page on our site is not indexed after a couple of days. So I’m wondering if there might be something I missed. I also did all the checks I could find and made sure nothing was preventing indexing, including the Search Console tests, everything seems fine.
John (Answer) 36:26
I-it’s really hard to say without knowing the individual URLs there. We don’t index everything on the web. So it’s completely common that for most websites, we index some chunk of the website, but not absolutely everything on the website.
So that might be something that you’re seeing there. With regards to the amount of content that we index from individual websites, sometimes that relies a little bit on our understanding of the quality of the website itself.
So if we think this is a really high quality and important website, then maybe we’ll go off and try to crawl and index that content as quickly as possible.
But there’s no guarantee there. So from that point of view, it’s kind of tricky to see what exactly is happening here. What I might do in a case like this is post in the help forum, just to make sure that there are no technical issues holding that URL back.
And then otherwise, I’d like to give it a little bit more time or see what you can do, overall, to improve the quality of the website in general.
Which is usually something that’s more of like a long term goal, rather than something that you can just quickly tweak and hope that Google will pick it up and tomorrow, everything will be different.
