This is a creative use of Google Search Console I’ve come up with for some easy SEO wins
And it’s been working really well on all my testing sites.
Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s official stats system for organic search, and has the most useful data about your site’s ranking, visits, clicks, etc.
They changed the interface for it some time ago and keep adding more data in it. One new page will show you all the pages in your site they’ve crawled, but chosen not to include in search results.
So they know about these pages, but don’t think they’re worth including in their results pages. The effect of that is these pages are not actually helping with your SEO at all. From an SEO viewpoint they may as well not be there.
There are two main reasons I’ve found why otherwise useful content is being ignored by Google:
- It’s just too short
- It’s not on-topic enough
Your content might just be too short
This is fairly self-explanatory. Unless you’ve got 300+ words of text on a page it will often be ignored.
Your content might not be on-topic enough
The best way to explain this is with an example, let’s think about a digital marketing firm. Perhaps when they started they offered a variety of services from social media content to web development and SEO.
Well now they just focus on the latter. Their homepage is about it, all their services pages are too – but they have old blog posts about their older services.
Google knows what a site’s core service offering is. And things that might fall outside that – either because they’re just off topic or simply old and reflect what a business *used* to be about – they’re likely to get ignored as well.
Re-purpose old content to get it indexed and working for your SEO!
Here’s my recommendation. Have a look through the list of crawled but not indexed pages and see if there are any you can fix.
Doing this myself I found any short pages I fleshed out, or outdated ones I re-tooled to reflect what I’m doing now – every single one got picked up again by Google.
In some cases it was just a matter of adding an extra paragraph to an existing post. That’s not nearly as cumbersome as writing an entirely new one but essentially gets a whole extra page indexed.
