Pages Not Getting Crawled or Indexed by Google (No Errors in GSC)

Understanding and Resolving Google Crawling and Indexing Challenges for Your Website

Introduction

Encountering issues where certain pages on your website are not being crawled or indexed by Google, despite appearing to be free of errors in Google Search Console (GSC), can be perplexing. Ensuring that your entire site, especially product and blog pages, are properly discovered and indexed is crucial for your online visibility and SEO success.

Common Symptoms

• GSC reports only core pages such as Home, About, and Contact as crawled and indexed.
• Product and blog pages, which are linked internally from the homepage and between each other, are not being crawled or indexed.
• Running live tests in GSC indicates that these pages are crawlable and can be indexed, yet no indexing occurs.
• Uploading new content and linking externally (e.g., guest posts on Medium) does not lead to automatic crawling or indexing.
• External validation tools, such as Schema.org validators, sometimes report that URLs are not found, citing issues like server responses or incorrect URLs, despite other crawlers fetching content successfully.

Potential Causes and Troubleshooting Steps

1. Verify Your Robots.txt and Robots Meta Tags
   Ensure that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking search engines from crawling your product and blog pages. Look for directives like:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /path-to-restricted-content/

Also, check for meta tags on your pages (e.g., <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">) that may prevent indexing.

1. Inspect Canonical Tags
   Incorrect canonical tags can cause Google to ignore duplicate or similar pages. Make sure each page points to the correct canonical URL, preferably self-referenced, unless intentionally consolidating pages.

2. Server Responses and URL Validity
   If external tools report “URL not found” or server errors, double-check:

3. The URLs are correctly formatted

4. The server responds with a 200 OK status code
5. The server is configured to serve these pages reliably (no 404 or 500 errors)

Use tools like cURL or online fetchers to confirm server responses.

1. Consider Crawl Budget and Site Authority
   New websites or those with low backlinks may experience limited crawl frequency. Building backlinks, creating high-quality content, and submitting sitemaps can improve crawl efficiency.

2. Sitemap Submission
   Ensure your sitemap is comprehensive and accurately lists all product and blog pages. Submit or update it in GSC, and verify