Why Google does not index pages and what to do
Common reasons a page does not reach the index, and how to fix them one by one.
If a page does not appear in search even after some time, the cause is usually technical or about content quality. Work through the list below, it covers most cases.
The noindex tag
The most common cause. The page code has a robots meta tag with noindex, or the same X-Robots-Tag header from the server. The engine honestly obeys it and does not index the page. Check it and remove it if it should not be there.
Blocking in robots.txt
The robots.txt file can forbid crawling of an entire section. If the page path falls under a Disallow rule, the bot will not go to it. Open robots.txt and check the rules.
Duplicates and canonical
If a page has a canonical pointing to another address, the engine treats that other page as the original. Duplicate content also leads to only one version making it into the index.
Thin or non-unique content
The engine may crawl pages with no value but not include them in the index. That is normal behaviour. Strengthen the content, add unique value.
The page simply has not been found yet
On new sites crawling is slow. Help the bot: add the page to your sitemap, add internal links and send it to crawl. You can quickly check availability with our checker.