How to Check for Indexing Issues and Improve Your Website’s Crawlability

To increase website traffic and your online presence, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial. Your SEO efforts will be ineffective even if your website is well-designed and has excellent content if search engines cannot correctly index your pages.

This post will discuss the value of SEO indexability and how to make your website easier to crawl. We’ll discuss typical indexing problems, including canonical URLs, HTTP/HTTPS, robots.txt, redirects, and HTTP status codes, and demonstrate how to use Wattspeed to look for them. Additionally, we’ll offer pointers on how to improve the crawlability of your content, including site organization, metadata, and HTML tags.

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll know more about the value of indexability as well as the tools and methods you can employ to enhance the crawlability and SEO performance of your website.

Introduction 

The term “SEO indexability” describes a search engine’s capacity to accurately index your website’s pages. For example Google may not be able to crawl and index your websiteif it has indexability difficulties, which could lower your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

As a result, SEO indexability is critical to website optimization. By making your website easy for search engines to crawl and index, you may boost your exposure in search engine results pages (SERPs), attract more organic traffic, and eventually increase your revenue.

The following sections will go through the fundamentals of SEO indexability, common indexability problems, and strategies you may employ to enhance the indexability and SEO performance of your website.

The basics of indexability

It’s imperative to first comprehend the operation of search engine crawlers in order to comprehend indexability. Bots or spiders, commonly referred to as search engine crawlers, are automated programs that scour the internet to find and index web pages.

When a crawler accesses a website, it starts by crawling the home page before moving on to other sites. The crawler gathers data about each page it visits while it is crawling, including that page’s content, metadata, and linkages.

The crawler transmits the data it has gathered about a page back to the search engine’s index, where it is kept and used to judge the page’s authority and relevancy.

But not every page on a website is equally significant or worthwhile. Individual blog articles or contact pages may not be as important as other pages, such as the homepage and product pages.

Indexability is vital in this case. Indexability refers to search engines’ ability to precisely crawl and index the pages of your website. If a search engine cannot index a page, it may not be indexed and so will not appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Common indexability issues and how to find them

1. If your website has indexability issues, its search engine rankings may suffer significantly. The following are some of the most prevalent indexability problems and how they may affect the SEO functionality of your website: When there are many versions of the same web page, the preferred version of the page is identified by a canonical URL. Multiple canonical URLs on your website can perplex search engines, causing duplicate content issues and a decline in search engine position.
2. HTTP/HTTPS: Search engines may be unable to effectively crawl and index your pages if HTTPS is not properly configured on your website. This may result in fewer organic visits and poorer search engine results for your website.
3. Robots.txt: You can instruct search engine spiders which pages on your website to crawl and index using the robots.txt file. Important pages on your website may not be crawled or indexed by search engines if you’ve blocked access to them in your robots.txt file, which will affect your website’s search engine results.
4. Redirects: When switching to a new URL or domain, redirects can boost a website’s SEO value. Redirects, on the other hand, may result in indexability concerns and decrease search engine rankings if they are not configured properly.
5. HTTP Status Codes: HTTP status codes, such as 404 errors for sites that can’t be found or 500 errors for server problems, show the status of a web page. If your website receives a high volume of HTTP status code errors, its search engine rankings may suffer.

You may increase your website’s crawlability and indexability by taking care of these indexability concerns, which will ultimately result in better search engine rankings and more organic visitors.

The good news is that Wattspeed allows you to check these concerns and more. Create an account now if you don’t already have one. You have seven days to try out our Pro features without charge. Additionally, you can link your Search Console property into Wattspeed so that you can view the status of your indexability and any problems right there. 

Wattspeed can analyze your website’s pages and give you a report that identifies any accessibility difficulties that can be hindering your website’s SEO performance. The following are some potential accessibility problems that Wattspeed can assist find:

1. Canonical URLs: Wattspeed can tell if your website has more than one canonical URL or if the canonical URL is blocked by a robots.txt file.
2. HTTP/HTTPS: Wattspeed can identify any encoding issues that might be affecting the crawlability of your website and check to see if it goes to HTTP, HTTPS, or noindex.
3. Robots.txt: You may access your website’s robots.txt file by entering the URL of your website followed by “/robots.txt” to check for robots.txt issues. The robots.txt file may prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your website if it is not available.
4. Redirects might cause indexability problems and harm your website’s search engine results. Wattspeed can help you find any pages on your website that are pointing to redirects.
5. HTTP status codes, such as 4xx or 5xx concerns, might harm your website’s search engine rankings. Wattspeed can detect any HTTP status code errors on your website.
6. Headings and “meta” tags Tags: If your canonical URL or meta> tags are outside your head> tag, Wattspeed will be able to tell.

This is just a partial list; Wattspeed can find additional potential accessibility issues on your website, which will allow you to address them and enhance your website’s crawlability and indexability. This may result in more organic traffic and search engine rankings over time.

Tips & tricks

for making your content more crawlable:

1. Site Organization: Both visitors and search engine crawlers should find your site easy to navigate and well-organized. Make sure your sites are easily accessible through internal linking, and employ categories and subcategories that follow a clear hierarchy.
2. In terms of metadata, title tags and meta descriptions should be optimized for each page on your website. These tags give search engine crawlers crucial details about your content and support a higher search engine ranking for your website.
3. HTML Tags: To make your material more understandable to search engine crawlers, utilize HTML tags like H1 and alt. Each page’s primary subject should be identified using an H1 tag, and pictures should be described using an alt tag.
4. Content optimization: Your material should be mixed with text, photos, and other media, and it should be optimized for pertinent keywords. Additionally, you should make sure that your text is scannable by using subheadings and bullet points as necessary.

It takes constant attention to detail and monitoring to increase your website’s accessibility and SEO indexability. You can make sure that your website is both optimized for search engine crawlers and easily accessible to all visitors by using tools like Wattspeed to discover potential accessibility issues and by putting the advice provided in this article into practice.

Recapitulating some of the most important lessons from this article:

• Understanding indexability and how search engine crawlers operate
• Understanding typical indexability problems and how they affect search engine rankings
• Checking for possible accessibility problems with Wattspeed, including canonical URLs, HTTP/HTTPS, robots.txt, redirects, and HTTP status codes
• Enhancing the crawlability of the material through site design, metadata, and HTML elements

You may increase your website’s SEO indexability and accessibility by adhering to these best practices, while keeping a close eye on its performance, and eventually increasing traffic and conversions to your site.