Check indexation of your site

Step-by-step Playbooks
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Contributors

@brandon-leuangpaseuth @andreea-macoveiciuc-content-expert

Business Benefits

Fix any indexation errors to improve search engine ranking and traffic.

Use site:yourdomain.com in Google and Bing search to see how many pages turn up in search engine results- take note of the number of results.

Replace yourdomain.com with your domain name. Look at the number as highlighted in the screenshot below:

850×458 24.3 KB

Compare the results in Google search to the number of indexable pages on your website.

Cross-check with your sitemap.xml file.

Check for errors or excluded pages in the Google Search Console (GSC) Index Coverage report.

If the error is not clearly stated or is stated as just an error, go to the URL inspection tool to inspect the URL, and you will be able to see the exact error.

Fix errors you uncover in GSC by contacting your webmaster, updating your sitemap, or using redirects.

  • If it’s a server error, check to see if there’s a connection problem or timeout by opening your URL in an incognito tab. If there is, reach out to your web hosting provider to fix the error.
  • If it’s a 404 error and the page was submitted for indexing, update your sitemap to remove the page if it no longer exists. If the content was moved, do a 301 redirect on your website to the new URL, and add the new page to your sitemap.xml file.
  • If the error is no index, and you want it not to be indexed, then take out the page from your sitemap.xml file. However, if the no-index tag was a mistake, then remove the noindex tag from your page code and publish the update.

  • Remove the no-index tag from your site via an SEO plug-in like Yoast, on WordPress or uncheck no index in page settings on Shopify or Wix.

  • If the error is that the URL is blocked by robots.txt, log in to your web hosting server control panel, navigate to your file manager and check for a robots.txt file in your website’s directory. If your page’s URL is after a code that has this:

disallow:, but it’s in your sitemap, and you don’t want that page to be indexed, take it out of your sitemap.xml file.

Go to Google’s coverage tool and click on validate fix to notify Google that you have fixed the error.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:35:16Z