How to earn your place in Google’s index in 2020

The 4 distinct types of indexing problems and how to identify them.

The game has changed. On average, 15-20% of your URLs are not indexed by Google. 

This is on top of partial indexing issues for pages that are actually indexed. Partial indexing is when your URL is indexed by Google but some of the content of the page isn’t indexed for numerous reasons. 

The larger your website is, the more likely you are to struggle with indexing. Just to give you some examples:

• Walmart: only 61% indexed by Google, 
• Yoox.com: only 19% of its content is indexed. 

E-commerce stores, publishers, even blogs. Nobody is immune to this issue. 

Walmart, Verizon, Medium.com — the type of the website doesn’t matter.

Medium.com is one of my favorite examples with ~20% of its URLs not indexed by Google, but the list of unindexed websites is very long. Our database is filled with thousands of big brands, brands you know, websites you visit every day that are struggling with getting their unique, indexable URLs indexed by Google. 

This article will shed some light on this problem and help you not only understand it but also diagnose, monitor, and fix it on your website. 

Before we get started discussing solutions to this challenge, let me shed some light on the history of indexing, partial indexing, and rendering SEO. 

A bit of history

Indexing issues are not just about JavaScript anymore.

The first time I saw a partially indexed page, I was amazed by this new phenomenon, but it was easy to explain this problem in 2017. Google would index the HTML content and skip parts of the page that relied on JavaScript. 

We started tracking indexing issues of our clients and other large, popular websites hoping to find out what was causing them. We quickly realized that indexing problems come in all possible shapes and sizes. 

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