As a website owner, you have followed all the rules: you obtained the best and cheapest domain and hosting, published a page, and verified your sitemap for the page URL. You have entered the page URL into Google Search Console. And yet, weeks later, there has been no traffic, and the page has not ranked in any of the major search engines. Where did it all go wrong?”
In most cases, the reason for your page’s low traffic and ranking has to do with technical issues rather than the content. Most of the time, when there is no traffic or ranking on your page, it may be because the page has not been included in the search engine index at all. In classic terms, a page that Google does not index cannot rank in a search engine, regardless of how useful or relevant a webpage’s content may be.
Technical issues can prevent discovery of your page, starting with how search engines crawl your site (React hosting platform) and how your server responds. Here we will take a look at some of the most significant technical barriers that can prevent search engine crawlers from finding your webpage.
Crawlability Barriers Block Search Engine Crawlers
Search engine crawlers find and explore new content on the Internet by a system of automated programs called “bots.” Without access to your webpage, search engine crawlers will not index it, and as a result, your webpage will not appear in search engines.
A malformed robots.txt file is an obstacle when trying to index a website. This is the file that indicates to bots which files and folders they can and cannot crawl. If parts of a website that should be accessible to a search engine are disabled in the robots.txt file, the search engine will not crawl these pages. Many website owners accidentally hide their site from Google because they forget to update their settings when moving from a test site to a live one. The Google Search Console Robots.txt Tester Tool can assist in identifying this type of misconfiguration before it causes indexing problems.
Another invisible problem with indexing is the lack of an XML sitemap. Sitemaps are not mandatory for a search engine to index its website; however, they allow for easier access to content that is not easily identified from the website structure alone. Sitemaps direct crawlers to content that they would not find by looking through the navigation structure of the website.
Indexing Directives and Meta Tags
Elements in the page’s HTML, like the meta tag, can be used as a method of communicating to a search engine not to index a webpage.
Crawlers will not index a webpage with the <noindex> tag included because this tag instructs the crawler to skip the page and not index it. The <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> tag can be helpful for things like staging sites or administrator sites that do not need to be indexed. But if a company mistakenly has this tag on one of its business pages, it will not be able to find that page in a search result.
Another potential scenario is if the canonical tags are misused. Canonical tags indicate what version of content search engines should index. If a canonical tag incorrectly points to a different page than intended, the search engine may or may not index any pages, resulting in a complete loss of search presence.
Broken Links and Redirect Chains Distract and Waste Crawl Budget
A website’s inefficient structure can cause issues with pages not being indexed. Because of this issue, when search engine crawlers visit your website, they spend a limited “crawl budget.” Broken links and excessive numbers of redirects result in wasting the crawler budget on dead ends instead of new content.
With redirect problems, it can be very tedious. It’s generally acceptable to have one redirect—for example, from your site (example.com/page1) to another page (example.com/page2). However, many redirects that lead to chains of redirects or redirect loops cause trouble for crawlers. Each of these could potentially prevent crawlers from reaching other parts of a webpage, such as images or text.
Server Errors and Downtime
Crawlers and users expect your website to be stable. If your server often returns 5xx errors, crawlers may lower their priority or even skip certain sections of it due to frequent errors. Regularly monitoring server health and uptime not only keeps your website’s human visitors happy, but it will also help determine how often crawlers will return and re-index new content.
JavaScript Rendering Issues
In the case of JavaScript rendering issues, crawlers may identify or access a web page that has a lot of dynamic content loaded by client-side scripts. A user sees a fully populated web page in their web browser; however, if the web page contains a lot of dynamic content loaded through client-side scripts, the browser can completely render it. To crawlers, it appears to have almost zero content.
Conflicting Signals in Search Console
The Google Search Console list of errors indicates that your website has issues with crawling.
- “Crawled – Not Currently Indexed” means that the crawler accessed your web page but chose not to index it because of a mix of technical and quality decisions.
- Technical errors can include content-related issues, such as poor quality or competitive factors.
- Technical errors, such as too much time to render pages, a lack of adequate internal links, and conflicting robots directives, are all contributing to this crawled-not-indexed status.
Putting It All Together
Understanding how technical errors create invisible barriers to blocking your content from search engines should be your technical SEO plan. Understanding technical errors helps to identify the issue with crawling; inappropriate exclusions, broken structure, and unstable servers all create technical errors that act as gateways between your content and search engines.
Before trying to find out why a specific page is not showing up, use the auditing of the technical SEO elements and other tools to complete this task. Google Search Console, crawl auditors like Screaming Frog, and site performance checks are all tools available to determine if technical errors will continue obstructing traffic, visibility, and business opportunities.
