People often complain that Google has failed to index all of their web pages and as a result most of their websites remain unutilized, leave aside gaining good ranking. However, this post will clarify some of the reasons why this happens and provide remedies.

Robots.txt File Mistakenly Excludes That Page or Folder

For some reason or other, you might have left out a folder or part of your site while designing and testing it and had also forgotten to remove the restriction in your sobots. txt file. Check this issue first and take the necessary steps if found true.

URLs Have Excluded Parameters

Similar to what happened in the case of robots.txt file, you might have asked Google to ignore specific parameters if they have contained duplicate content. However, the issue arises if you had actually wanted that to be included. In any case, you can check your webmaster tools account under site configuration, settings and Parameter handling to know more about it.

Inadequate and/or Duplicate Content

It is not unusual to come across sites that contain similar contents. In fact, in some cases it seems natural. However, the key to controlling such issues lies in instructing Google page/pages you want Google to read as also how to reach there. Also, you can use your robots.txt and parameter handling to let Google know the pages that can be ignored, so that the bots can get into the pages to index them easily. Incidentally, the issue not necessarily happens because of duplicate content – sometimes inadequate content can be a major issue, too.

(The prime role of content in a page is to let the user as also the search engines know what the page is all about. When there is hardly any text on the page, search engines obviously fail to rank that page.. Just having a page title and a meta description will not do; the content on a page needs to support the keywords in the titles to fulfill the job.)  

Inadequate Inbound Links can Also Cause Problem

Links, no doubt, are the pillars on which search engine rankings mostly depend on. When there is a lack of  adequate number of links coming into a website, there will be a dearth of ‘link juice’ to trickle down into the all the site’s pages. With larger sites having numerous pages, the problem becomes more acute. This obviously gives rise to indexing problems.

Navigation That can Hardly be Indexed

It is not unusual for many to run across navigation that is built in flash or other solutions that does not bestow indexable links to interior pages. Even though the problem can be solved by way of building contextual links to the interior pages it would be much better to overhaul the site. Good websites, as a rule are invariably provided with indexable and contextual navigational links.