When web users do a search for a keyword related to your business, you want your website to show up at the top of Google’s results. Not ranking can cost you potential customers and hurt your bottom line. Fortunately for business owners, figuring out why Google isn’t indexing your site isn’t overly complicated; in fact, it’s usually one of just a handful of issues. Here are six of the top reasons why your site may not be showing up in a Google search.
1. The content on your site is of poor quality.
Pages that contain good writing and good links will generally be indexed without any trouble. However, Google’s indexing algorithm is surprisingly hip to writing that contains a lot of errors in grammar and mechanics. The same goes for link quality: working links to reputable sites are what you want; check for links that are broken, outdated, or to sites that are full of spam.
2. There’s duplicate content on your site.
If you’ve got the same exact content on multiple pages of your site, Google may not index it, and as a result, you won’t show up in search rankings. If this is why your site isn’t being indexed, keep the repeated content on the page where it makes the most sense and put a redirect link on the other pages.
3. Keywords are used improperly.
First, you want to make sure you’re using adequate keywords in your content and in your site’s tags. Think about the terms that users will search for — those are the ones you’ll want to use. Second, while it may seem like a good idea, overusing keywords (also known as keyword stuffing) will work against your SEO efforts. This goes back to creating high quality content: websites written for readability by a human user will actually rank higher than websites written for Google’s indexing algorithm.
4. Load times are slow.
If your site is slow to come up, visitors will probably look elsewhere for the information they want. It also means that your site’s ranking will be negatively affected, as Google considers page load time when indexing. If you believe this is why Google isn’t indexing your site, use a web tool like Load Impact to help you assess what the problem is.
5. Images aren’t optimized.
Remember, Google’s indexing algorithm can’t see the photos and graphics on your site. To make sure you still show up high in search results, you’ll want to make sure that each image has a descriptive file name, an informative alt tag, and a keyword in its title tag.
6. You’re inadvertently fighting Google’s algorithm.
This could be one of any number of small but significant problems in your site’s code. You’ll want to make sure your privacy settings are turned off and that your metatags don’t have the NOINDEX command in them. You’ll also want to check for crawl errors as well as javascript configuration issues. Finally, it’s a good idea to create a sitemap.xml file for your site to make the indexing process as easy for Google as possible.
Montreal-based web development experts and SEO specialists Adeo Internet Marketing can help your website get indexed properly. From pinpointing the proper keywords to creating site content that will make you a thought leader in your field, we can help optimize your site for both Google and your customers. Give us a call today at (877) 841-5386, and let’s talk about how we can build a better website.
