Q and A: Why isn’t my home page indexed – and how can I fix it?

Question

Kalena…

Google appears to have indexed my Products page but not my front page or the information in my header source code. Why is this happening and how do I rectify this issue?

Thanks
Chris

Hi Chris,

Sometimes it takes us a little longer than we would like to respond to questions (sorry about that), so by the time I managed to reply, it seems that your home page (URL provided) has actually been indexed.

It appears to me that the site is relatively new, and although you would normally expect the home page to be indexed first, this is not always the case.  It appears that your product page was crawled and/or indexed first – and then (some time later) the home page appeared.  This may happen if you have more links to the internal page  nthan home – but at the moment it appears that you have just a few links to the home page,

For new sites, the types of things that you should do to help speed up the crawl/index/ranking cycle include :

  • Link Building – this is THE most important thing you can do
  • Check Crawl ability – ensure that your site can be properly crawled by search spiders (do a Google search for “Spider Simulator” for tools to help with this)
  • Add your site to webmaster tools – this won’t necessarily help with the crawl rate, but can at least show you how/when the site is crawled by Google and highlight any crawling issues
  • Create and submit a sitemap – this would normally only be of significant benefit for larger more complex sites – but for a new site can help with the crawl process

Your site is still quite young, and now seems to have at least been properly crawled and indexed, but there is plenty of scope for optimisation to improve your rankings.  I suggest that you start with the basics – look at generating additional content, optimise Page Title and description tags, implement search engine friendly URLs, and most importantly, undertake some link building.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Services Brisbane)

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