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My pages are no longer indexed by Google

A page that no longer appears in results has rarely been penalised. More often it was not crawled, or it was crawled and then judged equivalent to another. Those are opposite situations: the first needs the page made reachable, the second needs it made different.

Describe my issue Send a message

Not crawled, or crawled then set aside

A search engine works in two stages. It crawls an address, meaning it asks the server for it and reads what comes back. Then it decides whether to add it to its index. The search console distinguishes those stages clearly, and the reason given for each excluded page is the most useful information in the whole diagnosis.

An uncrawled page is blocked by a technical obstacle: an instruction forbidding crawling, no link leading to it, a server error at the moment of the visit, or a crawl budget consumed by thousands of pointless addresses. A page crawled but not indexed raises a different question: it is too close to another page, it carries a tag saying another version is authoritative, or its content is considered too thin to deserve its own entry.

What I most often find on a shop

  • Filter and sort pages generating thousands of different addresses for the same content, absorbing the entire crawl budget.
  • A canonical tag pointing at another page, often generated automatically by a module and never checked.
  • Product pages reusing the supplier’s description, identical across dozens of sites.
  • A crawl-blocking instruction inherited from staging and never removed.
  • A sitemap declaring addresses that redirect, or no longer exist.

Check page by page

  1. Ask the engine about the exact address

    The search console’s URL inspection tool gives the real state: crawled or not, indexed or not, and why. That is the source, not an estimate.

  2. Compare with what the robot sees

    The content the robot sees can differ from yours, especially if the page is built after loading by a script. A page whose text only exists after execution is harder to index.

  3. Check the canonical tag

    It is readable in the page source. A canonical pointing elsewhere amounts to asking not to be indexed.

  4. Look at how many addresses the site exposes

    If a shop with a few hundred products declares tens of thousands of crawlable addresses, the problem is not indexing: it is the multiplication of filter combinations.

Carry on with the right page

Describe your need in one minute

A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.

type
existant
stack (facultatif)
utilisateurs (facultatif)
echeance (facultatif)
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Frequently asked questions

How long does it take for a page to be indexed?
It depends on how often the site is crawled, which depends on its size and history. I do not give a deadline: explicitly requesting indexing of one address speeds up that page, not a whole catalogue.
My product pages are indexed, my categories are not. Why?
Often because categories have no text of their own and differ only by a product list. Editorial content specific to the category usually changes the situation.
Do I have to submit every page manually?
No, and it is not sustainable on a catalogue. An up-to-date sitemap and navigation that genuinely reaches every page do the work.
Is a slow site indexed less well?
Speed influences how many pages are crawled in a given time. On a large catalogue that becomes concrete: deep pages are visited less often.
Should filter-generated pages be indexed?
Rarely all of them. A few combinations matching real demand deserve a page; the thousands of others dilute crawling and are handled with a canonical declaration or an exclusion.