Google explains why fewer and fewer pages seem to be indexed

July 11, 2022

The number of complaints about pages not indexed by Google has increased significantly recently, at least in perception. John Müller has now explained why that could be.

If you scour the forums and social networks for indexing problems or complaints that Google is not indexing certain pages, an upward trend can be observed in recent months. Either Google doesn’t index pages at all, it takes longer to index, or indexing only works with the help of the URL Inspection Tool in the Google Search Console.

Google recently stated that the normal indexing rate of a website is only 30 to 60 percent – it is therefore completely normal that not all content is indexed.

In the Google Search Central SEO Office Hours of March 18, John Müller explained what could be the reason for Google not indexing a page. He said that many websites are very well positioned from a technical point of view. Sitemaps, internal links and other things are also well organized on these websites. From a crawling point of view, however, the demands in terms of content would slowly increase. More and more people are creating content that is technically ok, but not important enough for the search from a quality point of view – not spam, but also not fantastic content. The view must be directed to the entire website and not just to individual contributions.

Ultimately, this can lead to Google slowing down the crawling and indexing of a website because Google does not know how the content should appear in the search results.

Google hasn’t stopped crawling and wants to continue indexing new content. But there are more and more technically good websites, and Google has to decide which of the content is worth showing in the search. Google can’t index the entire web.

In the future, SEO and the creation of websites and content for them will no longer just be about which rankings the individual pages occupy in the search results, but above all about being crawled and indexed at all. The more new websites are created, the higher Google’s minimum requirement will be that must be achieved for this.