Pages aren't getting discovered or indexed

**PaulEchere** · 19 April 2023, 3:39 am

Around three months ago I put up a website that has quite a lot of pages (~2k), however to this day Google only has 20 of them indexed.

The sitemap is submitted successfully and G does see the correct number of pages on it. Now, I would probably not mind if pages were getting discovered but not indexed, however in my case G discovered the first 20 pages in the first week and then nothing for months after that.

Was wondering if there is something I might not know here (potentially can do) or whetehr it is still just an annoying matter of time.

**baldidiot** · 19 April 2023, 4:01 am

Are the pages real content or auto generated? Just thinking that 2k pages sounds like it might not be 2k articles. If it's just data or other thin pages then google might not bother indexing it if it doesn't see value, especially if they all suddenly appeared overnight.

Age plays a big factor as well. Three months isn't that old...

Look in GWT and see what the crawl rate is, both for refresh and discovery. If you have a decent refresh rate but discovery is low then it'll probably pick it up in time. If the refresh rate is also low then you might want to try and get that up.

Couple of links to non-indexed pages could help as well.

**Mattbar** · 19 April 2023, 4:07 am

Originally Posted by baldidiot

Couple of links to non-indexed pages could help as well.

Yes, that was what I was going to suggest. Get a few links to the non-indexed articles and see if that gives google a bump to increase the discovery and crawl rate. I've done this in similar situations and it often helps.

**AceHigh Pino** · 19 April 2023, 6:02 am

I've been all over the map with a site of mine that's been doing this for well over a year now. I had to go back and fix a **** ton of thin content, sometimes even re-writing whole pages and sections of the site. It went from 50 pages indexed last year to 227 this year and then to 98 and now to 174 -- seems like there's been more and more movement has been happening on this most recent Google core update, lol.

**edgarf76** · 19 April 2023, 8:04 am

I have the same problem. The way I looked at it is Google basically doesn't respect the content, I had it re-wrote and submitted for manual indexing. It worked most of the time. I am still working through these.

**xecutable** · 19 April 2023, 8:42 am

Originally Posted by edgarf76

I have the same problem. The way I looked at it is Google basically doesn't respect the content, I had it re-wrote and submitted for manual indexing. It worked most of the time. I am still working through these.

I had the same issue months ago. At first I thought it's the rewriting, but they were perfectly good articles, so I gave it a try on just manually resubmitting (without touching the content). It worked flawlessly for 100% of the things I submitted. Too bad there's like a 10 page daily limit and it took a month and a half.

Went around searching for a probable cause and it turns out Google had indexing issues on a few occasions and most likely I was one of the affected ones.

**Ninja16** · 22 April 2023, 8:50 pm

I have the same issue for a long time. My situatiaon is a bit different. I have AMP pages. All pages indexed but in search console in amp section some of them dissapear. What i assume is thin contents is enough to be indexed but not enough to be indexed for AMP Pages. Strong Pages never disapear but the thin ones does. So i think its about content. You may need to rewrite or add more content to pages.

**Moiz** · 23 April 2023, 2:05 am

if you have a news page most likely it will be indexed.

**xecutable** · 30 April 2023, 4:49 pm

Ok, so all of the sudden the console reports 80 pages not indexed. Started wondering what's happening again, submit manually 10 until the quota and went around looking for videos to get an answer (perhaps).

Watched a guy that said it was a search console issue and that it was out of sync and to do a "site:yoururl keyword" where the keyword is the title of the "deindexed url and wow indeed it is a search console issue. All of the urls are still in the index but the console returns them as not indexed for w/e reason.

So don't trust what you see in the console. Do a "site:url keyword" to double check they are indeed NOT indexed.

**baldidiot** · 1 May 2023, 4:39 am

Originally Posted by xecutable

Watched a guy that said it was a search console issue and that it was out of sync and to do a "site:yoururl keyword" where the keyword is the title of the "deindexed url and wow indeed it is a search console issue. All of the urls are still in the index but the console returns them as not indexed for w/e reason.

So don't trust what you see in the console. Do a "site:url keyword" to double check they are indeed NOT indexed.

Yeah this seems to be relatively common these days, especially on newer sites.

Something else I've noticed on these sites is that sometimes it won't show up for the "site:FULL-URL" search but if you search the page title it will. So the site:url query says it's not indexed but it actually is.

**xecutable** · 1 May 2023, 5:56 am

Originally Posted by baldidiot

Yeah this seems to be relatively common these days, especially on newer sites.

Something else I've noticed on these sites is that sometimes it won't show up for the "site:FULL-URL" search but if you search the page title it will. So the site:url query says it's not indexed but it actually is.

Yup I can confirm this is the case. Turns out all of these errors could potentially be a nonsense as it's my case right now. Instead of helping webmasters this seems to be causing confusion and in some cases from what I'm reading in the comment section on various forums panic.

**eenzoo** · 1 May 2023, 7:29 am

Imho ... it's all a question of parts of EEAT ... in that case it's Authority and Trust.
If you would be the Authority in your field, G would index you in a matter of seconds.
I do think, meanwhile Google is sooo bloated, that they have, resources wise, consider what to index and what not.
If you are site #12.334.999 on sports betting but not able to positioning your site as one of the best possible sources, why they should consider to index another article.

I have the same problem but different, if you buy links on budget for one special project, you have to consider toi buy one or two powerful links from Authorities, or 8-10 links from sites, lets call them "unnecessary".

If you go the second route, you have the problem that your links you bought don't get indexed, which makes them absolutely useless.
So I were looking for the best way to get those pages indexed. Maybe that can help you too searchlogistics.com/learn/seo/link-building/backlink-indexers-test/

**GameLandiaLtd** · 1 May 2023, 10:33 am

We also have this problem, but we managed to realize many pages in a short time. It takes Google time to index them automatically, as they say, doing it by the "hour." The self-indexing option in Google Console will also help to boost the indexing process. When the indexed content accumulates over time, you will literally believe in Winnie the Pooh's saying - the more, the more, the merrier!

**universal4** · 1 May 2023, 3:05 pm

I wonder if any of this has to do with the fact they are getting ready to drop the "page experience".

Notice: The page experience report will be changing in the coming months. Read more

I find it interesting they want to drop page experience, even though they have a higher percentage of that reported to folks that use the GSC and move to the "Core Web Vitals" report that they do not report for tens of millions of website in the GSC.

Maybe the slow down or lack of reporting of the indexed pages has to do with the changes coming?

Rick
Universal4

**content** · 1 October 2023, 11:36 pm

Now it's been a few more months since you made this thread, do you have an update on this?
Curious if they've picked up more of the pages by now.

I manually submit pages in GSC everyday, and I found they were indexing nearly all of them after I submitted my site map. Though more recently I found some of the newer content I have been making is not being indexed(not a duplicate content error or something, just not indexed even after requesting in GSC, says it's been requested and passes the page scan for "can be indexed" but just isn't anyway).

I definitely agree it is EEAT issue as my less competitive pages in the same general categories never have the problem. Not really expecting the more competitive term pages to rank for much of anything, but I put some work into some of them and thought in the least maybe having them was good for "topical authority" in the long run, or maybe might show up for specific searches with the same wording as wording used in my articles even if not really a good source of seo traffic. A vast majority of my content is indexed, though I do the manual submissions daily event though it doesn't work for some of the more general pages, the issue seems to only effect more competitive general search term titled articles even if the article is 3,000 words+(again, guessing they just don't need another page on the topic, but still figured was better to cover it than not). Not really a big deal since still most is getting successfully indexed, which is good enough, though sorta hoping maybe in the long run those pages might get picked up as my site grows.

Anyway, I'm wondering if in time since then, if more of those pages of your site got picked up or not

**PaulEchere** · 2 October 2023, 3:12 am

I manually submitted all the pages that I mostly cared about and those got indexed quite quickly. Although, additional pages have also been indexed since then. Of course not all of them, but right now there are about 700 indexed pages - 50 of which I submitted manually before.

**chaumi** · 2 October 2023, 3:45 am

You can't really equate Paul's to yours though, Content. Well, not with any real level of value. If I'm 'guessing' the site involved correctly, and assuming my detective skills are not desperately poor (which they may be in this case), it has (or appears to have) a very different history to yours. A history which may well have been playing a big part in its early (and possibly ongoing) performance.

**dachin** · 14 December 2023, 8:07 am

Whenever I write an article, I index it in Search Console. You may already know this, but I wanted to comment.

**baldidiot** · 15 December 2023, 4:36 am

Originally Posted by PaulEchere

I manually submitted all the pages that I mostly cared about and those got indexed quite quickly. Although, additional pages have also been indexed since then. Of course not all of them, but right now there are about 700 indexed pages - 50 of which I submitted manually before.

We've been testing out omega indexer more recently. It seems to be 50-50 at the moment. For some sites it immediately indexes them, others it doesn't help at all. My guess would be that it relates to the sites crawl budget - if the site has a sufficient crawl budget to index the urls, then the indexer can help it find them, but if the site doesn't then it won't help.

If you want me to test some urls to see if it would help just pop me over a small list.

**chaumi** · 15 December 2023, 5:32 am

This one's probably worth a try. Getting good reported results within some groups who know what they're doing.

Don't take too much notice of the simplicity of the site, there's a pretty big/trustworthy SEO industry name behind it...

powerindexing.online

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