Fix Google indexing problems on your site - Zephyra Studio

What the Search Console statuses mean

• Crawled - currently not indexed: Google read the page but did not include it. Most often because of thin or similar content, or because few internal links lead to it.
• Discovered - currently not indexed: Google knows the page exists but has not read it yet. On new sites this often means low priority, not an error.
• Page with redirect: the address leads to another address. Normal for old URLs, and an error if such an address sits in the sitemap or in a canonical tag.
• Not found (404): the page does not exist. Expected for deleted pages, a problem if it is still linked or in the sitemap.
• Server error (5xx): the server did not answer properly when Google came. Rarely permanent, but worth checking whether it repeats.
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical: Google picked a different address as the main one than the one you marked.
• Excluded by noindex and Blocked by robots.txt: the page is excluded, which is right when intended and a bug when not.

How we do the fix

We start from an export of addresses per status, because the number alone says nothing. For each group we establish whether the state is intended or an error, and what causes it: site configuration, sitemap, internal links or the content itself.

Then we fix the cause, not individual addresses. When the cause is one line of code or one redirect rule, a single change fixes hundreds of pages. At the end we ask Google to recheck the fix and watch whether the error count falls.

An example: one line of code, hundreds of addresses

On our own site, the function that builds canonical addresses added a trailing slash to every page, while the server redirected such addresses. So every page pointed, in its canonical tag, sitemap and hreflang tag, at an address that redirects. The cause was not visible on the site, only in the report and in a check of every URL in the sitemap.

What is normal and what is not

A new site, or one after a redesign, almost always has a large number of 404s and redirects from the old structure. Google drops them on its own within a few weeks, so not every red number is a problem. The problem is addresses we send to Google ourselves, meaning in the sitemap, canonical tag and internal links, that lead to an error.

That is why a review always ends with a split into three groups: errors we fix, states that are expected and we leave alone, and things to watch for a week or two before deciding.

What you get

• A list of causes per group of pages, with the reasoning for what is an error and what is not.
• Fixes to the causes on the site (code, sitemap, canonical, hreflang, redirects, noindex, internal links).
• A request to Google to recheck every fixed group.
• A short before and after report with numbers from Search Console.