Are you seeking to improve your business website’s search engine optimization (SEO)? Then, Google Search Console is a tool that you absolutely need to be using.
It’s a free service from Google that allows website owners to monitor their site’s performance in search results.
So, now let’s come to the point, one common issue that many webmasters face is getting their sites fully crawled by Google.
If your pages aren’t showing up in search results, or if you’re not seeing the level of traffic that you’d like, then it could be because your site isn’t being crawled properly.
So, in this article, we’ll take a look at how to get Google Search Console to crawl your website in detail.
How To Check And Fix Google Search Console Indexing Issues For Your Website?
Firstly, it’s worth checking whether or not Google has already indexed any of your pages.
To do this, simply head over to the search engine and type “site:yourdomain.com” into the search bar or replace “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name.
Now, you can see all of the pages on your site and indexed by Google.
If you see all of your pages here, then congratulations. There’s no need for further action!
However, if some or all of them are missing from this list, then there are some underlying issues on the site itself or its sitemap.
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How To Ensure Search Engines Can Crawl And Index Your Website Correctly?
- Check The robots.txt File And Sitemap For Issues
The first thing to check is whether or not there are any problems with the robots.txt file in place on your server.
This file tells search engines which parts of the site they should and shouldn’t index.
If something important is accidentally blocked here (such as CSS files), then it can prevent certain parts of the page from being crawled correctly.
Follow the below steps to check if the robots.txt file is causing an issue:
- Enter ‘yourdomain.com/robots.txt’ into a new tab.
- Review each directive outlined in plain English.
- Ensure nothing critical is blocked (page resources, sitemap link, etc.).
Once everything checks out with the robots.txt file, you should then investigate whether or not your site’s sitemap is causing any issues.
This XML document lists all of the pages on your site that should be crawled and indexed by Google.
Without a sitemap in place, crawlers have to rely on discovering pages through other means like internal linking structures.
To create and submit a new sitemap for Google Search Console:
- Produce an updated version of the sitemap as an XML file.
- Ensure it contains URLs to every page they want to index.
- Do not exceed 50,000 URLs within any one single file.
- Upload the new version of the sitemap to the web server root folder.
And, to do so, Sign in to your Google Search Console account > Properties > Sitemaps tab > Submit a new one.
Submitting or updating your website’s XML sitemap will trigger crawling. But may take some time for them to fully index everything on-site.
- Address Duplicate Content And Optimize Meta-Tags
Another issue that can cause difficulties with crawling is duplicate content across multiple domains/subdomains. For example:
Yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com
M.yourdomain.com
If this is affecting you – search engines may be struggling when deciding which URL version takes priority over others.
A solution here would be implementing 301 redirects which can redirect traffic hitting incorrect versions “301 redirects from www.yourdomain.com/page1.html”.
So, Google knows where the canonical copy resides (e.g., https://yourdomain.com/page1.html).
This clears up confusion and ensures only one “true” URL version gets correctly ranked.
Lastly, ensure all meta-tags describing each page are using relevant keywords/descriptions worthy of being used as snippets in SERPs.
It’s worth noting that even if all of these steps are followed perfectly, there’s still no guarantee that every single page on your site will be fully indexed.
However, following these best practices will put you in the best possible position to have your site crawled properly.
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