We have seen thousands of domains that - in one way or another - suffer from indexing issues.
In most cases, it's a content or backlink issue.
Google usually does a good job at discovering and indexing pages. Google simply chose to not index your pages.
⚠️Most common reasons why your pages are not indexed:
Thin content: AI was used to quickly write thousands of pages. The pages often have less than 500 words. Google does not see this as useful content and will simply not include it in the index.
The pages were indexed before? We often see that search engines give your content a chance and see how users interact with it. The content was indexed for a few weeks but then disappears because user signals show that the content is not useful.
💡Solution: you need to drastically improve your content. Google the target keyword and make an inventory of what elements the top ranking page has.
What are the distinct elements that are present om the top ranking pages?
Hero
Introduction
Summary
CTA
images
fact sheet
expert quotes
...
How long is the content?
You need to have these elements as well.
Your domain has no backlinks. We have seen many times that a user started a website and the domain quickly got to 20,000 pages. Without backlinks, it will not rank.
Google doesn't trust your site (yet). There are SEO spammers who try to get their content into the search engine (sometimes hundreds of thousand of pages within days). A website with no backlinks and low DR is not going to get that many pages indexed. The more domains refer to you, the more pages you will be able to index.
"Crawl budget”: Google bot spends a certain amount of time crawling through your site every week. The more established/authoritative your site, the more time the bot spends on your domain crawling through all pages. Build links to maximize crawl budget.
💡Solution: Build foundational links. Foundational links are links from business directories and social profiles. When you are starting out or have a Domain Rating < 25 or < 30, these are the cheapest links you can build. We frequently see improved traffic and indexing after building at least 500 foundational links.
Too competitive. If you're trying to rank for an extremely competitive search term (1-2 word search term, e.g. "coffee") in the US, chances are that hundreds (or thousands) of people have written about this topic already. The top domains have links worth millions.
💡Solution: Niche down. We recommend to focus on longer tail keywords your-keyword + unique spin + location (instead of "coffee" chose "iced macha latte houston").
For websites that serve users in different countries, it is recommended to translate your content. Non-english content is often way less competitive. You can find low hanging fruits keywords using the content generator.
No internal links. If your website does not link to our pages, google will not index them. You need to build internal links to all your pages.
If you own example-domain.com and your page example-domain.com/my-great-service has no links from the home page or other pages, it likely won’t be indexed. For small sites, a lack of internal links is often not a problem.
We have seen domains with hundreds of thousands of “orphan” pages (the website has 300,000 pages and none of the pages have any link).
💡Solution: Build links from your homepage to collections pages. On the collections pages, build links to individual item pages. This helps google bot to naturally crawl through your website.
Too many pages: It's not true that the more pages you have, the more clicks you get. We have seen quite the opposite. We work with large marketplaces with hundreds of thousands of pages. 95% of the pages never got a click in the last 6 months. In fact, we are currently working with a very large market place that just no-indexed *check notes* 700,000 pages and traffic is up.
💡Solution: Analyse which pages don't get any clicks and/or find pages that have very low positions in the search results. If their rankings are not improving and you do not have the capacity to improve them, consider to no-index the pages. You will have a much better ratio helpful pages:bad pages. Overall, your domain will look much more useful to the user and to search engines.