Why Your Indexed Pages Going Down: 5 Possible Reasons?

We all know why indexation of web pages is extremely important. The pages that aren’t indexed will not rank in the search engine results page. To check the pages that are indexed on your website, you can use the Google Search Console. It is a no-brainer that getting the webpage indexed by the dominant search engine is very important for web-based businesses. Why are your indexed pages going down? Here is a comprehensive guide that tells you why:

The Loading Time of Your Website Is Slow

Google likes to index only fast websites. The loading speed of your website has a significant effect on the indexing of the web pages on your website. You need to ensure that your web page has a proper 200 HTTP header status. Fast pages are more likely to get indexed by the Google Crawler. If you have a heavy website, you can use Xenu, DeepCrawl, or Botify to test the crawling speed of your website and troubleshoot the speed inhibitors.

You Have Recently Removed the Duplicate Content on Your Website

Google doesn’t have a penalty for duplicate content. However, having duplicate content on a website can burn the Google Crawl budget. Hence, removing duplicate content is essential. Optimizing your website by implementing the canonical tags, no-index tags or robot.txt disallows to remove any duplicate content. This will result in the indexed pages going down. However, you will have to double check whether the fall in the indexed pages is exclusively due to the implementation of these tags. Remember that the idea of indexed pages going down may not always be bad.

Frequent Change in the URL Structure

Often, when you make any change in the CMS or the backend program, it results in a change in domain or the subdomain. This leads to a constant change in URLs of a website and hence decreases the indexing of the page. This is primarily because the search engine crawlers remember old URLs and are often unable to redirect accurately to new URLs. Hence, frequent changes in the URL structure are also responsible for indexed pages going down.

The Search Engines Are Seeing Your Website Differently

The search engine bots sometimes see your websites differently. This is because some developers build a site without focusing on the search engine optimization parameters. You can counter this issue by using a Google search console fetch and then render features to make sure that Google Bot is looking at your website exactly as it should.

Your Web Pages Are Timing Out

Another reason cited by SEO Company in India for the fluctuating number of indexed pages is when web pages time out. Most servers have a bandwidth restriction due to the cost associated with higher bandwidths. In such cases, you must upgrade the servers.  On many sites, certain IP addresses are blocked for visitors trying to access too many pages at high frequency. This is done to prevent any DDOS hacking attempt, but this may also affect the traffic to your web page.

Key Takeaways:

• Indexing of web pages happens after the crawling of web pages. Make sure your pages are optimized for search engine crawling.

• Indexation is the process in which the Google Crawler adds web pages to Google search results.

• An increase in the indexed pages means you can increase the number of keywords that you can rank for that page.

Conclusion

When Google doesn’t index your website, it may be due to the following reasons:

• Your website has been penalized. The penalty can be a result of using black hat SEO techniques, thin content, poor SEO, or heavy flash content.

• Your pages are considered irrelevant by Google Bots or Crawlers.
• Google Bots are unable to crawl your web pages due to poor link structure.

However, as we established above, it’s not always bad when the indexing of the pages goes down. To improve your website’s performance on search engines, you can take professional assistance from a leading digital marketing agency in Delhi.