Why is My Content Not Indexed or Ranked in Google?

Not having your website content show up in Google and Bing is frustrating. If you are not ranking for your target terms, you might not even have the content indexed. This blog post will share how to check if your content is indexed or not to even rank in search engines.

 

Video Explanation

This video shares how I have a certain keyword “Albany SEO” that is not ranking well within Google. It is, as of 10-25-2023, ranking on page 10 of Google. However, the issue is that the page itself has not been indexed by Google, which is why the ranking is so bad.

 

Here are the steps that I took to discover this issue and what I’m doing to rank the content.

 

Technical Restriction

There might be a technical restriction that won’t allow the content to be crawled, indexed, and ranked in Google. Some of the most common reasons for a technical error are below.

 

• The content is set to NOINDEX, which means Google and Bing won’t show the page in their results.

• There is a canonical tag issue that is confusing search engines.

• You are blocking that path in the robots.txt file. For example, search engines won’t crawl the content of your URL says /services/, and you block the /services/ path in the robots.txt file.
• The content is pure spam or has malware. This issue is rare, but it can still restrict Google from crawling, indexing, and ranking your content.

 

How to Check if there is a Problem with Your Content in Google?

 

Head to Google Search Console (and Bing) and fetch the URL you want to rank. Both tools offer a fetch option, so the tool will tell you if there are any issues with the URL.

 

If there are no problems with your URL with either search engine, you must move on to the next step.

 

Perform a Site Command Search in Google / Bing

If there are no crawling issues with your content, you must see if Google / Bing has indexed your content. Perform the following search command below in both search engines.

 

site:domain.com intitle:name of post. For Bing, you need to do site:domain.com “name”

 

 

If nothing comes up in one or both search engines, they have yet to index the content. If your content does show up, you will need to work on your SEO to rank the content for your target terms. However, you must move to the next step if you don’t see your content in search engines after performing this search.

 

Add Internal Links to your Target Page

They need to crawl that content to help search engines crawl, render, index, and rank content. To help, add internal links to pages crawled often by search engines. The most obvious place you can place the link is the homepage, but there are other places where you can add the link.

 

Perform the following search command in both search engines to see what their search engine deems as your most essential pages via a crawl.

 

Next, you will want to add relevant internal links to your target page.

 

Fetch with Google and Bing

After you add the internal links to your site, you must clear your cache. Afterward, go to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and fetch the URLs to both bots. The goal is to force both bots to recrawl the content and follow those links to that new page. Chances are good that this will fix the problem.

 

As a note, that screenshot above is me showing you can request indexing again for that target page. I recommend doing that along with fetching the other pages you add the internal links to.

 

How to Check Your Work

• Use a ranking keyword tool like SEMrush and see if you start ranking for your target term for that target page. If you start seeing movement here, you are all set.

 

• You can perform a search command in Google / Bing daily to see if the content is indexed.

 

Do you Still Need Help / Need Help in General?

If you need help ranking your website in search engines, don’t hesitate to contact me at greg@tmblast.com. I can run a Free SEO Audit to see if any issues are causing your site to not rank in Google and Bing.

 

Additional Services

• Albany SEO
• Worcester SEO
• NY SEO