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Indexing is where the whole SEO game begins. Most people don’t care about indexing & keep ranking about SEO being ineffective. But it’s not their fault. Indexing is highly subjective and confusing. Dealing with indexing issues all alone is daunting. But with proper knowledge, you can manage any type of indexing issue.

By the end of this issue, you will be able to:

1. Identify “Not indexed” pages that need fixing
2. Batch reviewing pages that don’t need your attention (even though they’re not indexed)
3. Identify pages that are okay to not get indexed

Indexing is the primary requisite every website must check off to make the website eligible to get traffic from searches. People panic when they see a “Not indexed” report in the Google search console.

If you keep panicking every time a page is removed from the index without knowing the actual reason, you’d waste a lot of time and resources, especially if you’re managing the SEO all alone.

In reality, only a fraction of all the “Not Indexed” pages need your attention. For example, pages under Excluded by the ‘noindex’ tag are valid and that’s how it should be.

You just need to know what pages need fixing. Just focus on the Reason & you’ll have a lot less to worry about. Upon seeing the Indexing report above, I can say that only 28 out of 95 pages need my attention (Discovered – currently not indexed & Crawled – currently not indexed)

Categorize pages in these 3 steps:

Step 1: Rightfully “Not Indexed”

These are the pages that don’t need any attention. When you’ve tagged a page as ‘noindex’. There’s also room for error. Go through all the reasons thoroughly to not miss out on genuine pages that aren’t indexed.

Step 2: Needs further confirmation

For some reasons like Duplicate content, 404 & pages with redirects, you may need to check the pages under that reason. If you think these pages are wrongly deindexed, you can immediately fix them there. Click on Validate Fix to push the pages for review & get the pages indexed.

Examples of this category of pages:

1. Sitemaps & feeds
2. Similar pages
3. International pages
4. Product variant pages
5. Wrongly classified pages

Step 3: Fix immediately

From the report above, we should focus on two reasons – Discovered – currently not indexed & Crawled – currently not indexed. Click on the reason in the Page Indexing report to see a list of all pages listed under the reason. If you have a huge list of pages under a particular reason, export the URLs to better control the data.

Once downloaded, here are the types of URLs that you should look for:

1. Old URLs: Pages that are no longer active, redirected pages & sample pages. You don’t need these pages, you can remove these pages from the index.
2. Junk URLs: Sometimes Google crawls comments, paginations & other junk pages from your site. These pages can also be deleted/removed from the index.
3. Non-Canonical URLs: When you have multiple pages with the same or similar content, Google sees that as duplicate content. Canonicalizing pages avoid such problems. Get the non-canonical URLs, fix them by consolidating all similar pages & tagging the canonicals properly.
4. Domain/protocol variants: When you have variants of protocol (https or http) or domain variants (www or non-www), Google will choose a page on its own & deindex the rest.
5. Thin content: A functional page, for example, a dedicated page for web stories has little to no content. Such pages are deindexed by Google. Add some content to those pages to avoid that page from deindexing.

Today’s action step → Download indexing reports data, analyze the reasons & go through official documentation on the Indexing report

SEO this week (News Updates)

1. Google’s SGE experiment has complaints. Google is open to suggestions
2. Google is posing as a threat to content creators
3. How to prepare for AI Search?
4. 7 content categories that don’t have AI results, yet
5. How to optimize entities in search that rank in AI results

Clickworthy resources (from LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube & web)

1. How to analyze content to grow on LinkedIn?
2. How to get 100k visitors in 6 months using SEO?

Tools Repository

1. Find all plugins for ChatGPT in one place – Whatplugin.ai

How can I help you?

I put a lot of effort to come up with a single edition of this newsletter. I want to help you in every possible way. But I can do only so much by myself. I want you to tell me what you need help with. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Twitter & Email to share your thoughts & questions that you want to be addressed. I’d be more than happy to help.

If you’re looking forward to winning online, here’s how I can help:

1. Sit with you 1-on-1 & create a content marketing strategy for your startup. Hire me for paid consulting.
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3. Join my tribe on Twitter where I share SEO tips (every single day) & teaser of the next issue of Letters ByDavey.