Introduction
Any good SEO agency in Lucknow or from any other part of the world will tell you this one thing about ranking your web pages on search engines: it is not possible without indexed pages. Having your website and all its webpages indexed on all search engines is essential as without it there would be no ranking of any webpages. In simple terms, search engines cannot rank web pages on their search engine results page unless that webpage is indexed.
You can easily check the number of indexed pages of your website on Google through Google Search Console. Other search engines also provide similar options to website operators.
You can also check your complete indexation status via Webmaster tools.
There can be multiple reasons behind the number of your indexed pages going down on search engines such as:
- Search engines are not able to crawl your webpages
- Search engines deem your webpages are irrelevant and invaluable
- Your website has one or other kind of penalty from the concerned search engine.
With that said, here are some possible issues to fix in case your indexed pages are going down:
Are the Pages Loading Properly?
For a webpage to be deemed worthy of indexing, search engines need to ensure that they are loading properly, completely, and at a face past. It is, thus, necessary on your end to ensure that all your pages have the proper 200 HTTP Header Status.
You can easily check the HTTP Header Status of your website and find out if it’s 200 or not via various HTTP Header Status Checker tools available online. It can be done through crawling tools such as Deep Crawl, Xenu, Botify, etc.
Did Your URLs Change Recently?
The URL is the basis of indexing a webpage. If it has changed recently due to changes in backend programming, CMS, or server setting (that lead to changes in the folder, domain, and subdomain,) then these need to redirect to the correct webpage, otherwise, you risk the chance of a webpage being de-indexed i.e. deleted from the index of any search engine.
If this is the case, then make sure to plan out 301 redirects to the correct and corresponding URLs.
Did You Fix Duplicate Content Issues?
Duplicate Content is a big fat no when it comes to running any business website as they decrease the credibility of the website and its pages. This can also lead to a lower ranking on the search engine results page. A digital marketing company in Lucknow and other cities of the world can help you fix this problem by creating 301 redirects, noindex metatags, and canonical tags. This can also involve disallowing robots.txt.
Taking all these measures can lead to a decrease in indexed URLs of any given website. This is one of those cases where de-indexing an URL is a good thing because this allows the URL to be indexed with a brand new start with original content, this time around. Just ensure that this is the reason behind de-indexing of web pages and not anything else.
Are Your Pages Timing Out?
No search engines like indexing pages that time out as it makes for a rough user experience. This can also lower your webpages ranking on search engine results pages over time.
This problem might be arising due to the bandwidth restriction of certain servers. It can also be due to specific hardware configurations that can be easily resolved by upgrading the processing of the hardware. Upgrading the memory limitation on the hardware configuration can also be helpful.
There can be a lot of reasons why your web pages might be timing out. Decrease the chances of your pages being de-indexed by making sure that your pages are not timing out when crawl bots and users go through them.
Do Search Engine Bots See Your Site Differently?
A website owner and developer might be seeing the web pages completely different from what the search engine bots are seeing. It can be because of the CMS design, creating webpages that are incompatible with SEO, or the website being hacked and seen as something different than the original design. There can be a number of reasons behind search engine bots viewing the webpage differently than what it is in reality.
You can use Google’s Search Engine ‘Fetch and Render’ feature to ensure that the search engine is seeing the same web page as you are. It is an important step to ensure that your web page is not de-indexed for looking inauthentic, suspicious, or potentially harmful to the user. You can also use Google’s Cached page to check the same, like other search engines.
Conclusion
We can conclude this by saying that there can be various reasons for the decrease in the number of indexed pages of any particular website. However, you can use the guidelines mentioned above to find out the true reason behind the de-indexing of your website and then start working on fixing those issues. It is important to know that the guidelines mentioned above are only general suggestions that might or might not apply to any particular case. That is why it is necessary to work with experts to find out the genuine reason behind the de-indexing of your web pages and then let them correct the course and get your web pages re-indexed.
