Indexing Issues

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What can go wrong with indexing?

Two major issues can arise with indexing.

• Content is not indexed: An obvious one is the content won’t be indexed. So, if Google really doesn’t like the content or actually can’t find the content, then it won’t index it.
• Content is added to a secondary index: If Google has found the content but thinks it’s quite weak or maybe it’s duplicate, it actually has a secondary index, and we sometimes call this a supplemental index, and that’s an index that it rarely uses. So, you really don’t want to be in that secondary index, and we’ll talk about some of the things that you can do to avoid that in this module.

How to minimize indexing problems

Just to recap on indexing issues and how to minimize problems.

• Avoid site and URL errors: Redirects are quite good for that.
• Minimize duplicate content and weak content: We want Google to be really interested in the content, and our users to be interested in the content.
• Avoid blocking useful content and resources: We’re going to look at this in more detail in a moment.

Consequences of blocking resources

Googlebot is the name of Google’s crawler. It wants to see the exact same content that a user sees. And if you block resources like JavaScript or images or something like that, then what they’re actually seeing will be slightly different to what the user sees. So, we really need to try and minimize doing this.

Also, if we are blocking some useful content, there’s a chance we might be losing search engine trust. And the one thing that we want to do, as you would expect, is to build search engine trust. So, we need to be quite careful with what we’re blocking.