Indexing errors can affect your site's visibility and performance on search engines. They occur when search engines cannot crawl, process, or index your pages properly. In this article, you will learn how to troubleshoot common indexing errors and fix them using tools and best practices.
Your robots.txt file tells search engines which pages and resources they can access and which ones they should avoid. If your robots.txt file blocks important pages or resources, such as images, CSS, or JavaScript, it can cause indexing errors. To check your robots.txt file, use the robots.txt tester tool in Google Search Console or a similar tool for other search engines. Make sure you allow access to all the pages and resources that you want to be indexed and disallow access to those that you don't.
Canonical tags are HTML attributes that tell search engines which version of a page is the preferred one to index and show in the search results. They help prevent duplicate content issues and consolidate the ranking signals of different versions of the same page. To use canonical tags, add a <link rel="canonical" href="URL"> tag to the head section of each page, where URL is the canonical version of the page. Make sure the canonical URL is consistent, accessible, and relevant to the page content.
Your XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages and resources on your site that you want search engines to crawl and index. It helps search engines discover and prioritize your content. To optimize your XML sitemap, make sure it follows the sitemap protocol, includes only the pages and resources that you want to be indexed, excludes the pages and resources that you don't, updates frequently, and has a reasonable size and structure. You can also submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console or other search engines' webmaster tools.
Your crawl budget is the number of pages that search engines can crawl and index on your site within a given time frame. It depends on factors such as your site's size, speed, popularity, and quality. To monitor your crawl budget, use the crawl stats report in Google Search Console or a similar tool for other search engines. You can also use the log files analysis to see how search engines are crawling your site. To optimize your crawl budget, make sure you eliminate crawl errors, reduce redirects, improve page loading time, and prioritize your important pages.
Structured data is a way of adding extra information to your pages using a standardized format, such as JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa. It helps search engines understand and display your content better, and can also enable rich results, such as snippets, images, or ratings. To fix your structured data, use the structured data testing tool or the rich results test tool in Google Search Console or a similar tool for other search engines. Make sure your structured data is valid, accurate, relevant, and consistent with your page content.
Request indexing is a feature in Google Search Console that allows you to manually ask Google to crawl and index a specific URL on your site. It can be useful when you have made significant changes to a page, added a new page, or fixed an indexing error. To request indexing, use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console and click on the "Request indexing" button. Note that this feature does not guarantee that your page will be indexed or ranked, and it has a daily quota and limits.