Google Will Likely Index Content That’s Important

John Mueller of Google discussed the importance of helping Google understand important content to help index it. While he mentioned the role of external links, his comprehensive answer seemed to emphasize how important content is and provided five ways to highlight that importance.

The URL is detected but not indexed

The person asking the question is that they create content for customers but the Google search console reports that the content is detected but not indexed.

Not indexed This means that the content has not been placed in Google’s index for consideration to rank.

Non-indexed content may also not be present.

The SEO responsible for creating the content was looking for guidance and Mueller made suggestions, including the idea of ​​external links.

What does crawling without indexing mean?

The person asking the question wanted to know what it means to have content detected (crawled) and not indexed.

Asked:

Does this mean that Google thinks this content is not ideal for indexing? Or what does that mean?

In the context of the above question, John Mueller suggested that Google not indexing content may not necessarily mean that something is wrong with the content.

John Mueller discusses Google content indexing

John answered:

“I don’t think it means anything, in particular. … I think that’s always an easy, precocious assumption of saying, oh Google looked into it but decided not to index it.”

Mueller then explains what he means by saying that everything is not automatically indexed.

John continued his answer:

“Most of the time, when we keep crawling something, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to index it automatically.

So I’ll treat these two unindexed classes as something similar.

And that’s difficult because we don’t catalog everything, so that can happen.”

How is content indexed faster?

The person asking the question was followed up by noting that the pattern of their failure to index content occurs across five or six customer websites.

He asked John Mueller for advice on what to do to help with the cataloging.

“…Is there anything else that, if we did, might help with the indexing?”

John Mueller made the following suggestions:

“I mean… there are different things, you probably do already…

On the one hand, making sure that it is easy for us to learn about the important content on the website is a really good thing.

Which sometimes means creating less content and delivering better content. Therefore, having fewer pages that you want to be indexed.

The other thing is that internal linking is very important for us to understand what you might consider important on a website.

So things, for example, that are linked from the homepage are usually a sign that you are interested in those pages, so maybe we should pay more attention to them.

Externally linked things, they also fall into this category as we see other people who think these pages are important, then maybe we’ll see them as important too.

And then sitemaps and RSS feeds help us from a technical point of view a little better to understand that these pages are new or have changed recently.

We’ll have to check it again and see what’s in there.

But all of these things…come together and it’s something there’s rarely a single trick missing to indexing these pages.”

The person who asked the question is following up on the issue of external links that help index those pages.

Talk about how the customer shares articles on social media and get links to those blog posts.

the person asked:

“Now we are using the blog post to link to other pages as well. So linking to these blogs, which are not indexed by Google, will have an impact on website ranking or will it add any value…?”

Of course, we all know that links help a site rank, so Mueller’s answer on this point is not surprising.

The most interesting part of his answer is how he emphasized again how external linking can help Google highlight that the article is important.

This topic about the importance of the article is frequently repeated by John, so it might be something to think about a little deeper.

Mueller replied:

“I mean…if we find external links to those pages, we should probably crawl that page and index it, like a little bit above, I think.

This depends a bit on the type of external links, of course.

There are usually links from social media with no follow attached so we don’t really forward any mentions there.

And if it’s something we can get to know so well that maybe these are problematic links or not helpful links, we might as well ignore them.

But obviously, if we can tell that something is seen as important, we’ll probably go ahead and crawl that page and probably index it.

What you generally won’t see is that we’ll kind of redirect to the rest of the site if we haven’t already indexed that page.

Because if we decide not to index this page, it’s still a situation where, well, we don’t have a destination for those links, so we can’t do anything with those links to the rest of the site.”

If something is important it will probably be indexed

John Mueller’s answer seems to give a little hint of one of the ways Google decides what content to index.

Mueller clearly hasn’t given up on the algorithm.

But he shared an important insight about indexing regarding the article’s importance.

One useful feature is that it helps make important content easier to find on Google.

And of course, to do that, the content has to matter to begin with.

Make it easy for Google to identify important content

John Mueller offers five suggestions to help Google identify important content.

Five ways to highlight important content

1. Make less but better content
2. Internal linking can help indicate what content is important
3. A link from the home page can point to content of interest
4. External links can indicate the relevance of the content
5. Sitemaps and RSS feeds can point to content of interest

Creating content that is important to readers in some way is a good way to increase the likelihood of external links and enthusiasm for the site in general.

the quote

It is likely that Google will index the content of interest

Watch at 21:04 minutes: