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Is Anyone Else Having Indexing Issues with Google Search Console?

4 points by nsesites ↗ HN
Hi all - I'm having issues getting my site (http://twkids.app) Indexed onto Google Search Console. I've submitted my Sitemaps over a month ago & also have all the same URL's as Internal Links from my homepage. However, not a single one of my Sitemap URL's has been indexed. It just says "Discovered - but not currently Indexed" & status is "Started", but no other explanation. The Google Crawler automatically indexes some pages but it's been quite slow. And the Inspect URL works, but it's very manual & there's a daily limit (I have around ~60k pages to index).

Is anyone else having Indexing Issues and know how I can resolve this? Any advice would be very helpful!

9 comments

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dingosity
I've had nothing but troubles with Google Search. They keep emailing me to tell me I have problems and they won't index my pages. When I look at the specifics, it's clear they're looking at the last version of my page that was hosted by Google Sites and are ignoring the current version hosted on a mix of GitHub and CloudFront. Even after deleting my Google Sites sites 8 years ago, they're still refusing to look at anything other than the stale cache they keep around for unknown reasons.

I think it boils down to "you're not Amazon or Facebook or the NYT, we don't care."

nsesites
Spot on - small fish don't stand a chance now.
dazc
You should check the live page and look at the source code and headers that Googlebot is actually seeing. Sometimes something obvious will scream out at you.

An extreme example, source code says 'noindex'. Less extreme, you aren't flushing the cache as efficiently as you think.

nickelcitymario
Yup! Bing and DuckDuckGo indexed my Substack site ages ago. Google continues to think it doesn't even exist.

Just search "Insurgent Marketing" and compare the results.

I've uploaded my sitemap to search console. Manually entered each page. Nothing. It's ridiculous. I've never had this issue before.

nsesites
My guess - due to massive amount of AI generated pages. Google must be slowing things down until they figure it out.
radq
I'm having similar problems and haven't found any way to resolve it. Even had previously indexed pages start to drop off the index. Ended up putting that project on the back-burner.
nsesites
Makes it very difficult for new sites to get off the ground. My guess - due to massive amount of AI generated pages. Google must be slowing things down until they figure it out.
sharmi
I have been watching Google Search Console closely for little over a year now due to several projects I have on it and have observed similar issues.

These patterns predate the GPT3 and ChatGPT changes.

Patterns I have seen: 1. New site does not get indexed, though it satisfies all of Google's requirements. 2. Old sites slowly lose pages from it's index. Sometimes pages get added again but the net change is always negative. 3. New pages added to existing sites also do not seem to be indexed.

OTOH, if there are indexing issues that Google warns about, you fix it and mark it as fixed in Google, those get verified around 2 weeks later and has a sizeable impact on impressions.

dazc
'It just says "Discovered - but not currently Indexed"'

Check these pages as they may have broken links, insecure links (http) or missing images.