Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, I'm revisiting a topic I've written about before: scary emails from Google Search Console. But this time, I have a whole new resource to share! Check out the link below, and I'm hoping it will be useful enough to make it into your bookmarks 📚

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

"New reasons prevent pages from being indexed on site ..."

If you have a Google Search Console property set up for your website domain you will have received emails with a subject line like this.

(Sidenote: if you don't have Search Console set up, you should check it out! It's great free data. More background here.)

These emails make it sounds like something is terribly wrong with your website – that some technical error is preventing Google from including pages in it's index, and thus, hiding your valuable content from the Google-searching public.

These emails often cause alarm, and give users the impression something is seriously wrong with their website. (In fact, clients often forward these emails to me, as you can see in the screenshot below)

In reality, these emails are simply Google’s automated systems alerting you that Google can’t (or won’t) index a URL that it has previously discovered or crawled. Sometimes this is a bad thing, but often it’s not. You can’t ignore these emails altogether, but it’s not necessarily bad news.

To determine whether there are any issues that need attention, you’ll need to look at the Page Indexing report in your Google Search Console property.

And this is where things get confusing.

The Page Indexing report is full of useful details, but it's often tricky to understand what you need to pay attention to, and what you can safely ignore.

It's sufficiently complicated that I provide a paid audit service to help website owners understand these reports!

But I've gone through this audit process enough times that I figured I should write out a cheatsheet to help you understand the different categories in the Page Indexing report.

Here it is:

👉🏻 Understanding "Page Not Indexed" Issues in Google Search Console​

In this article, I provide quick and hopefully digestible explanations of each category, including:

• Page with redirect
• URL blocked by robots.txt
• Blocked due to unauthorized request (401)
• Crawled – currently not indexed
• Alternate page with proper canonical tag

... and many more.

You might not need this now, but considering bookmarking this guide so the next time you get one of those scary Search Console emails you have a resource to look at!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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