https://natehoffelder.com/blog/google-no-longer-automatically-indexes-websites-wtf/ fbpx * Nate Hoffelder * Home * Hire Me + My Services + Website Maintenance + Spring Cleaning + A la Carte + Simple Author Websites + Freelancer Websites * About + My Story + Speaking Gigs + Portfolio + Testimonials + Author Resources * Side Projects + Art Projects + Little Free Libraries + Author Website in a Box + Simple Author Websites + The Speaker Bureau + The Swag Bag Project * Website Resources * Free Downloads * Contact Select Page [ ] Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites - WTF? [Depositpho] by Nate Hoffelder After a decade of running The Digital Reader, Nate is a veteran web publisher with experience in design, maintenance, recovery, and troubleshooting. What little he doesn't know, he can learn. Tips and Tricks May 30, 2023 Can you please take a few minutes today, go to Google, and search for your website using the site search filter? (EX: site:mysite.com) Do you have about the right number of pages showing up, or just a few pages, or worse yet - none? The reason I am asking you to do this is that I've noticed recently that Google no longer automatically indexes websites, and thus is not sending traffic to those sites. Here are a few examples: * A couple months a new client came to me and asked me why her 4-month-old website wasn't showing up in Google. It was in Bing and DuckDuckGo, but not Google. (I fixed this, but I neve did find the cause.) * Yesterday I helped out someone on Reddit who could not figure out why his two-month-old website had not been indexed by Google. (I told him to submit a sitemap in Search Console, and see if that helped.) * This morning I discovered that a site where I am the volunteer webmaster had not been indexed by Google. The site is a year old, perfectly functional, and I had already submitted a sitemap in Search Console, and yet even though Google has a sitemap showing 9 pages, Google had only indexed the home page. (DDG had indexed the entire site.) Folks, I have been a web designer since 2016, and before that I was a blogger for 6 plus years. I have been deeply interested in Google SEO since 2010, and in all that time I've never heard of Google not indexing a site. Oh, sure, sometimes the website owner sets a noindex tag (accidents happen) but I have never heard of Google failing to index a site for no reason. Google used to just index every site whether you wanted them to or not. That's why the noindex and nofollow tags even exist, to give website owners more control over what Google did on their site. This is so unheard of that I honestly didn't use to bother to check whether a site shows up in Google unless I was asked to do so. I've literally never needed to do that when working on SEO (it would be like making sure gravity still works). in fact, Google's own help pages say that you can pretty much assume that Google will index your site. So if you have time today, you really should make sure that your site is showing up in Google. If Google neglected to index your site, you're missing out on traffic. So how do you fix this? TBH, I am not sure. I would have thought that submitting a sitemap would fix this issue, but that didn't help with the convention website. So what I am currently trying as a solution is using the "URL Inspection" feature in Search Console to force Google to index each page. It's time and labor intensive, but I don't have another option. EDIT: The URL Inspection feature does work to get pages added to Google search results, and that is a relief. Alas, Google is only indexing the specific page I put into URL Inspection, which means I still have to solve this one page at a time. That is going to suck for anyone who has this problem with a huge site containing hundreds of pages. Stay on Top of Industry News Subscribe to my mailing list to receive a weekly newsletter containing links to 6 to 8 stories and other interesting tools I found, plus some commentary to explain the context. Plus, I'll send you a lead magnet design guide, a media kit template, as well as other freebies. Success! Name [ ] Email [ ] Subscribe [headshot-1-620x409] Hi, I'm Nate. I build and fix websites for authors, and I am also a tech VA. I can build you a website that looks great and turns visitors into fans, and I can also fix your tech when it breaks. Let me fight with tech support so you don't have to. My blog has everything you need to know about websites and online services. Don't see what you need. or want personalized help? Reach out. Learn More about Me - Prev: Monday Morning Coffee - 29 May 2023 Next: Monday Morning Coffee - 5 June 2023 - You May Also Like... 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Reply + Nate Hoffelder Nate Hoffelder on June 4, 2023 at 11:58 am This is just weird, isn't it? Reply 2. Neal Neal on June 5, 2023 at 9:43 am My sites show hundreds of results and my logs show it is being indexed often by Googlebot. Google seems to use different methods for finding web sites. The most common method follows links to sites. If your site isn't mentioned by anyone else or linked by anyone else, then it won't be indexed by Google. They also have a lot of unpublished rules (that seem to change often) for deterring people from planting fake sites or gaming the page rating system. Another method includes sending the URL via gmail or google chat to other people. If you paste the URL, Google will go out and get a preview of the URL. Google will also add the URL for indexing later. (This is how they found one of my honeypots.) A third method is to register your domain using Google's Domain Tools. But that's not Google "finding" the site as much as you telling Google to about the site. Reply + Nate Hoffelder Nate Hoffelder on June 5, 2023 at 10:14 am I used to think putting the sitemap into Search Console would do the trick. That doesn't work any more. Also, that convention website I mentioned had been shared via Gmail multiple times, and Google still only indexed the homepage. Reply 3. Paul Lutus Paul Lutus on June 5, 2023 at 10:18 am >> "EX: site:mysite.com" This is a mistake. I just submitted my site (arachnoid.com) as in the example: site: arachnoid.com And got one valid link, the remainder of links were medical references to words like "arachnoid" But if I submit a full link including "https", then I get a full index of my site's pages. So, to date at least, my site is still being indexed. The article's text might not show the actual search string, of course. If true, this reply falls into the broad category of tempests in teapots. Reply + Alexander Williamson Alexander Williamson on June 5, 2023 at 3:12 pm We deal with courses, articles and jobs on our site. A few days ago we found the jobs functionality which Google scans pages for certain schemas, and the indexing of those completely died worldwide so Jobs I'm Google Search died, and Google didn't know much about it. That got fixed in the end. We also use paid Google Indexing API which you can bulk submit updated and deleted URLs to tell Google to reindex a page. Reply Submit a Comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment * [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] Submit Comment [mfe_send_fox title="Can I send you my website toolkit?" body=" I've compiled a list of resources, services, and products you can use to build a website. Let me send it to you. 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