Why Isn’t My Website Being Indexed By Search Engines?

At one time or another, you may have manually submitted your website to search engines without success, and wondered why your website wasn’t being indexed. And perhaps you even used a submission service, all to no avail. You are not alone. Many websites are also unable to be indexed. Fortunately, there are ways to correct your problem.

Below are some common factors which might delay or even prevent your site from being indexed by search engines, as well as suggestions on how to fix the problems.

Time Elapsed Since Submission

Patience is key. While we hear of services that promise to get a website indexed within 24 hours, the typical time for a website to get indexed is 1-8 weeks. If you need to get indexed more quickly, some search engines offer paid submission options.

Already Indexed

You may be already indexed. Before fretting about being unable to find your website in a search engine, refer to that search engine’s documentation on the method to find a particular website. Additionally, beware of submitting your website to often. With some search engines, duplicate or excessive submissions can hurt ranking.

Reachable From Homepage

Search engines have been known to drop certain pages from their indexes that cannot be reached from the home page. For this reason, many websites include site maps. However, if your site is small, a good navigation should suffice. (Note: Search engines generally index pages that are reachable within 1 to 2 links from the home page.)

Inbound Links

Many search engines refuse to index websites that do not have any links pointing to them from other sites. You can easily remedy this situation by submitting your website to directories, soliciting links from other similar sites, and by being active on discussion boards.

Frames

Frames have often been big problems for websites. Frequently, search engines are able to index the main content of the homepage, but not the navigation, resulting in only one page of the site being indexed.

Free Web Hosting

Some search engines refuse to index or simply limit the number of pages that they will index from website residing on free web hosts. This is most likely due to the poor quality of sites on these hosts as well as their frequent use by spammers.

To avoid being discriminated against, simply purchase your own domain name and opt for a respectable host. (For a domain name and basic hosting, you can expect to pay $90 - $150 per year, a small price to pay for a search-engine-friendly website.)

Unfriendly Dynamic URLs

If your website is dynamic, many of your urls might contain question marks (?) and ampersands (&). Unfortunately, many search engines ignore these urls. As a result, if you want these pages to be indexed, you will need to create search engine friendly urls (most likely with .htaccess files) or generate static versions of each dynamic page.

JavaScript, AJAX, and Flash

Some content is non-indexable by search engines. This includes, but is not limited to JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, Java applets, audio or video files, or text included in images. Be sure that there is actual rich text content on your website or it may be ignored by search engines.

Slow Loading Pages and Unreliable Web Hosts

Web pages that take a long time to load may negatively affect your site being indexed. For example, a web page might timeout before a search engine can index the content. To avoid this problem, keep your pages small. Minimize whitespace, optimize images.

Similarly, a web host that is unreliable also makes it impossible for a search engine to have consistent access to your website. This could result in pages not being indexed, or pages that are already indexed being dropped from their databases.

Search Engine Optimization or Spam?

If your SEO tactics are questionable, a  search engine may penalize you for spamming. So be careful when optimizing your pages and do not excessively repeat keywords or use special techniques to serve different content to search engines and other content to visitors.

If you need an outside opinion for your website, just leave a comment and we’ll provide a few suggestions for how you can get your website indexed.