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Why Your Awesome Site or Blog Isn’t Indexed

Posted on February 28th, 2010. Written by mobiledummy.

You’ve disallowed the spiders in your robots.txt: This will always be main reason why sites are not indexed simply because it’s a classic search engine optimization mistake. If you’ve set your robots.txt to disallow the search engines from entering your site, you can’t complain when they follow your command. Go check out your robots.txt file and make sure you’re allowing the spiders into your site. If you’re finding that your site has 0 pages indexed, do yourself a favor and go check out that robots.txt file. If it looks like the one below, you have a problem:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Your server is too slow

Google’s not going to directly penalize you for running on the slowest server ever, but it may occur indirectly. If Googlebot notices that your site is having a hard time keeping up with their request for information, they’re going to hand it a cookie and let it rest while they go spend time with someone else. This means they’re not going to get through your entire site before they stop crawling pages, which in turn means fewer pages for you in the index. You can’t fault Google. They don’t want to be responsible for crashing your site. So instead, they’ll just go on their merry Google way, leaving your site still standing but not fully spidered. They’ll pick up the rest of your subject’s information over at your competitors.

They think you’re a spammer

If Google has decided that you’re engaging in some bad behavior and are trying to deceive them or their users, they’re not going to index your Web site. Fix up your site and submit a reinclusion request to Google. They’ll take a look and if they decide you’ve correct it they’ll let you back into the index and start indexing your site again.

There’s another side to this. If you’re having trouble getting the domain you just bought 3 months ago to rank, it could be that you’re feeling the wrath of someone else’s penalty. Take a spin through the Wayback Machine and discover what your site looked like before you took control over it. If it was touting the non-friendly variety of PPC, you may be in for a hard time.

Bad Navigation

Is your navigation designed in all Flash? Does it consist of 90 percent broken links? Yeah? Well, then the spiders probably aren’t going to be able to access it, let alone index it.

Spider Traps Galore

Spider traps come in many different flavors and varieties. It could be that your JavaScript is taking up the first 2,000 lines of code, that you require cookies or some other user dependant action for entrance, that you’re sporting some seriously crazy dynamic URLs, that your home page is redirecting 7 times before finally hitting something, etc. All of these things are huge roadblocks for a hungry spider trying to get to your content. Remove them and give the search engines easy access. Otherwise, start putting your dollars back into advertising in your Sunday circular again because that Web site isn’t going to do you a hell of a lot of good.

Site’s down / Too many 500 errors

If the search engines keep trying to visit your site to no avail, eventually they may stop trying. They don’t want to index a site that isn’t going to load when users trying to access it. Returning these sites makes Google look like Yahoo’s confused cousin. Make sure your Web site is free of hosting issues and sits on a fast server.