Why Google Isn't Indexing your Website - Possible Reasons

By Zohaib Liaqat - 28 Comments

Why Google is not Indexing my Site?! Are you facing the same Problem? Having you website indexed by Google is one of the most important parts of SEO. Your site must be indexed by Google if you want to get massive organic traffic from Google. If your site is not indexed, you are lost. You will get no organic traffic from Google and no one will see your site in the Google Search Results. If you're facing the problem that Google is not indexing your site, so in this article we're sharing some possible reasons due to which Google is not indexing your site.

Why Google Isn't Indexing your Website - Possible Reasons

Your Website have Lots of Duplicate Content

Having Duplicate content is a major problem which prevents Google to index your website/blog. To much duplicate content on your site confuses the search engines and they give up on indexing your site. If multiple pages/URL's on your website are returning to the exact same content, then your website has a duplicate content issue and that's the reason Google is not indexing your site.

Your Site is Indexed under a www or non-www Domain

If your website is indexed under a www or non-www Domain, then Google may not index your site because technically www is a sub-domain. So, be sure that you add both with www and without www domain to GWT and verify ownership of both domains.

Google may not have Discovered your Site

If your website is new, then Google may not have discovered it yet. Wait for a few days and for better indexing Sign Up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. This helps Google crawl and index pages that it might not discover through normal crawling process.

Meta Tags

If your site has NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW meta tags in your template, it means you're saying no to the robots. Basically, these tags prevent Google to index your site. Here is the meta tag, so be sure that your site doesn't have these type of tags:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Robots.txt Disallow

This file is in the root of your website and it communicates with search engines to index your site or not. If this file contains User-agent: * Disallow: / it means that its saying to crawlers that not to index any page of your site. The fix is easy, just remove that text from that text file and your site will be indexed.

Your Site Don't Have a Sitemap.xml

You haven't submitted your sitemap to GWT. If you haven't submitted your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools or your Sitemap is not updating for some reason and you just have some old/broken links in GWT then you might face indexing problem. Read our article How to Submit your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools on to learn How to Submit Sitemap. If you've submitted your sitemap and you're still facing the problem then resubmit your sitemap.

Your Site Takes too Long to Load

If your website takes too much time to load then Google might not index your pages. Because in this case spiders will skip your site as they can't reach it, so they'll not index your site.

Connectivity or DNS Problems

If your website has downtimes, for this reason spiders cannot reach your server when they try to crawl, they fail, due to downtime. So check your connectivity and the fix is to contact your hosting provider or buy a new one.

There are also some other reasons that cause your site not indexed by Google. So if you're facing Google Index problem, then read and fix the above reasons and keep searching for more till your site gets indexed.