Though you did a lot of on-page optimization, sometimes your website(s) could fail to get indexed by search engines. You would laugh at me if I say that the causes are neither considered critical but ignored silly.
What I’m trying to say is that there would be no error in applying SEO for your website and web optimization tools you used could have caused no harm(considering you never used those black hat optimization programs). There could be some other reasons for not getting your website indexed.
I would like to focus on those miscellaneous reasons and solutions to overcome those problems in this article. This is not an ancestor or successor version of the previous website optimization article you have read in the past.
Let’s skip into the reasons and their respective optimization techniques,
1. Make sure your website is not blocked from indexing
I don’t mean to frighten you with the big word ‘block’ in the beginning itself. I actually mean to ask you to check your website code for any robots.txt blockage.Yeah I mean it!
Sometimes, we don’t realize the fact that robot.txt file control the indexing of our website content and all site optimizations we are doing are just an additional decorations to make our website look perfect for search engines to index. In an obsession of making extra decorations to the website, we forget about the robots.txt file.
So, make sure your website is not blocked by,
- The robots.txt file in the root directory
- The ‘noindex’ tag in the <head> section
- the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header
2. Modify robots.txt file
Robots.txt is not just used for ‘allowing’ and ‘blocking’ the whole content of the website where as it can be used to control the indexing parts of your website.If you don’t have idea of using webmaster tools, use the Google robots.txt file tester in webmaster tools to check the visibility of your website for specific robots.
3. Fix HTTP Response Codes
Search engines also care about your website’s availability. Though the website is well optimized and if it can’t be accessed by search engines due to some “Not found” and “Server Errors”, what’s the point of optimizing it so far?Solve the “404 not found” and “500 server errors” in order not to get out listed from the search results page. You can permanently redirect the 404 error pages to the homepage or the new versions of the page to fix this issue. Check the server connections and configurations if they are properly set to get shown for the search engine bots as well as organic traffic when visited.
However it is essential to buy the hosting service with 99.99% uptime and there are certain things to keep in mind while registering a domain.
4. Set redirects to www version of the domain
Search engines consider the www and non-www versions of the same page as two different pages. This creates the duplicate content issues on the site though you have written all unique articles so far.To prevent this duplicate content issue, set the main domain of your website with www instead of leaving it a naked one. For example, the naked domain would look like amfastech.com/url-continues.html and the www version of the same page would look like www.amfastech.com/url-continues.html.
Add necessary records in the domain settings to show up your domain with www version.
5. Do not place content in Frames
Frames are discontinued in newer versions of HTML and so by the search engines. In fact, frames confuse search engine algorithms with vague visibility.If you want to use the functionality of the frames, that means you have to upgrade your site design as soon as possible. Follow Google recommended principles of web design and make your website search engine friendly.
6. Remove spam from site
You may not be aware of the spam scripts or malicious code that has been running on the site since few days. Search engines including the giant Google would ignore sites badly in search results. Sometimes the spammy sites would be banned at worst.Keep checking Google webmaster tools for spam or malicious code alerts. Do not install unverified plugins and widgets on your site.
Spam is not just the malicious code on the site. It is also the invalid ‘dofollow’ links you are giving to external sites. If you are following the like exchange method, stop it today! Because Google penalizes site that link farm to increase their visibility in search engines. Giving ‘nofollow’ can save you somewhat but not of total.
I recommend you to read the articles about fixing unnatural links on your site and importance of ‘nofollow’ in saving you from getting penalized.
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