Key points to remember
- The concept: That's why it's important to focus on pages that are worth your while, and on pages that you have...
- Objective: This information is important, even if it doesn't require work here.
- The method : Measure and optimize your results
- Profit : Gain visibility and performance
Search Console is an important tool for seeing the coverage of your website, i.e. which pages are indexed and which are not.
In addition to having a list of pages that aren't indexed, Google Search Console will give you the exact list of problems on each page, telling you why it isn't indexed.
While some problems may seem trivial, others are a little more complex and may require a little more work before a page can be validated for indexing.
Before embarking on indexing all the pages of your website, it's important to understand that not every page deserves to be indexed.
In fact, legal notice pages, old blog pages that don't rank for any keyword, or reference pages with very little content will never merit indexing as such.
So it's important to focus on pages that are worth your while, and on pages you've decided to rank for your keyword.
Indexed pagesThe list of pages indexed by Google will be displayed in the indexed pages section.
This information is important, even if it doesn't require work here.
Pages that are already indexed on your website are proof that Google is able to get to your site, that it has crawled the entire page, and that it has deemed that page worthy of its position on the Google results page.
This page is therefore eligible for keyword positioning, and could start receiving traffic.
Non-indexed pagesNon-indexed pages, on the other hand, present a few more questions.
If not all of them are problematic, notably because you may have chosen to de-index certain parts of your website, the pages that may not have been indexed involuntarily will require some work on your part to justify and deserve their indexing.
Google Search Console will give you information on 404 errors, 500 errors, canonical tags, or even sometimes not give you information on the page's indexing.
Main problemsThe main problems encountered in your content are usually 404 or 500 errors.
Correcting these errors involves going to your website, trying out the URL to see its response code, and correcting it in your CMS.
It's not necessarily advisable to hide all 404 errors by redirecting them to your home page; the idea is more to find the most relevant page to send this traffic to.
Google will also bring up pages it finds duplicating each other, explaining a problem with the canonical version.