Indexing issues anyone?

Yeah, or instead of or on top of "estimated interaction scores" perhaps there's not enough "uniqueness" which they might have conflated with "value"? Although typing that out, at least for affiliate terms, don't know if such measures would work given there's only so many ways to craft a buying guide or product review.

I feel like Barry's hypothesis tracks in terms of fundamentals, why spend $ indexing everything when you don't have to? Ask a hundred tech "executives" this question and I'd be surprised if anyone said "because it's our duty" or "out of fairness".

THAT said, if they're not indexing anything below a certain indexation score for example, how the fuck are new sites supposed to exist? Will new sites be limited to only those with massive budgets, full PR campaigns, and dozens of high authority established publisher backlinks? i.e only corporations will be able to rank in the future? It does feel like they've moved that direction over the years..

If that were the case I feel the Internet would get stale pretty quick, although there may be some within Google who think all you need is Forbes, HuffPo, Amazon, PCMag, Walmart, Wikipedia and Wirecutter to satisfy every possible query a human might have for the foreseeable future.

But then what about queries that deserve freshness, new and trending searches? Rely on a finite set of publishers to cover every possible topic that could be in demand by users? That would require a lot of hubris but that IS one thing Google employees seem to never be short of.

If even half of this "intentionally ignoring" line of thinking is correct it would be a very bleak development indeed, although not a terribly surprising one in a market ever increasingly dominated by monopolies.

The denialist in me is going to keep holding out hope this is just a bug...and hoping Apple's engine is nearing a surprise launch date...
 
harrytwatter said:
Yeah, or instead of or on top of "estimated interaction scores" perhaps there's not enough "uniqueness" which they might have conflated with "value"?
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Yes, this is definitely it.

Also seems to have to do with the existing quality of the content and also the quality of the content itself on a relative scale.

The problem of course with this, is that quality is often improved incrementally. Like, someone will do a review that is a little bit better than the previous content. You don't want to index that?

As for the rest of what you're saying, Google wanting only the mainstream, that's where I can get paranoid, because Google is now very much involved in politics. They don't only serve searchers, they also serve the CIA and Congress among others.

They have increasingly changed their algo to keep stuff out, the politically inconvenient, not get new stuff in.

As censorship and partisan divide continues, Google needs more and more control, with not letting "wrong think" into the search results.

I fear this is the case.

If you want proof, go search on Yandex for something that is even remotely controversial and prepare to be blown away at the difference.
 
Yeah I've been noticing it. I have bilingual friends in Taiwan who have shared all kinds of COVID news that I'd never heard of via search, YouTube and Twitter and when I tried to go find it it took multiple query refinements (ended up having to include "Taiwan" and refine date range) to find the news story.

It's absurd you have to dig so deep to find what is generally non-partisan coverage of touchy subjects. Taiwan because of their history are a naturally "China-skeptic" nation and therefor, you'd think, if claims about China's lack of transparency with int'l/U.S investigators is accurate, would be something worth not burying?

The frustrating thing is they seem to have applied to this to political and non-political queries equally. I'm into cars and regularly searching pretty particular comparisons of features, say how the new Land Rover Defender that launched in 2019 has been working out for people in terms of reliability.

Page one featured snippet is "1/5 this score is based on reports from owners of previous models". Likewise the whole rest of page one, including JD Power references, are all either equating reliability to old models or have "predicted" reliability scores. The car was brand new in 2019 so comparing to other models isn't helpful at all, and we're now almost into 2022 so why are we still "predicting" reliability of a car launched in 2019?

Other particular searches for Ineos Grenadier, Bronco Raptor, (similar off road vehicle specifics) return the same worthless press conference bullshit, straight from Ford's PR/comms department in Dearborn direct to Hearst's Road & Track "magazine" served up hot via Google. It's a hollow ineffectual monopoly circle jerk.

You know where real useful information written by real car geeks and real owners reporting first hand their experiences with their vehicles lives? Forums. But I never see forums rank and have to append my queries with "forum" or "hd forum" or "reddit" and THEN I can find actual uniquely valuable content.

I imagine forums have been relatively shadow banned because they are an obvious well for "conspiracy theories" or any other narrative that Alphabet/Twitter/Congress doesn't want disseminated.

Fine, I don't give a shit about conspiracy theories but if you blanket de-value forum results you're also de-valuing the purest, geekiest content out there on endless numbers of super refined long tail queries that have nothing to do with politics at all.

Sad part is average person has no idea how Google works, even when "reliable" rank-worthy "news" orgs do dives they still get it wrong, so the average consumer is doubly unaware of how search has degraded, especially without a competing alternative. Heck, most of them are still unaware everything they buy at their local grocery store is produced by a dozen companies with like, 5 staple ingredients, 4 of which are corn derivatives..

TL;DR perhaps the "not going to index this" was folded into a concerted effort/project to only return approved publishers, which itself, to your point Bernard, may have been born entirely out of political pressure. Cost savings with not having to continually scale infrastructure to support every new piece of content is just an added benefit :wink:
 
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Yeah, I think that may be the case unfortunately.

In practical terms, I guess we have to work hard on looking mainstream and authoritative.
 
Ok, so while some sites seem to have a great trouble getting indexed, some other sites seem to get indexed asap and rank asap.

From published to 100+ visitors a day in less than a month.

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This one has to do with a snow activity, so I guess there might be some "query deserves freshness" going on.

It's still a simple "best x for y" type post.

Anyway, I am publishing like crazy on this domain because of this. I published another snow and ice post "best x for y" and it ranked top 3 for "best x" within a day.
 
One way they could be trying to "predict quality" or user satisfaction could be page structure. They probably have enough data to at least try it, (of course in addition to other things like PR). That could be one way they would try to solve the growing indexing issue. Just by using modifiers in the keyword, they might be able to make estimated guesses.

My hope, is that the indexing issues are due to AI content, and that it goes back to normal when they have a good way to handle it.

I posted some articles on parasites to see if it would index faster than my sites. The parasites were definitely lower quality, if they index faster, I'll mention it.
 
I started a brand new site and published five posts. I had no SEO tools and wasn't finished setting up all the basics on the site. The next day all five posts were indexed without even giving Google a sitemap. So I have no idea what's going on.
 
I have one article from July, that was indexed last week. Sometimes you need to be patient. However, I have to admit, that my site authority is pretty low
 
I've had the thought for some time now that these indexing issues might be a way to target link sellers or at least have the consequence that those spamming paid blogposts might find google not being in a hurry to index them.

It seems to me as if indexing is judged on a quality and uniqueness scale, but very relative to the main keywords. Thus if you're doing generic sponsored posts on generic keywords, then your chances of a speedy indexing are close to zero.
 
my search console says 70+ urls submitted and indexed. yet when searching `site:buso.com` it only shows 5 urls.

site was launched 4 months ago with about 15 static pages and other pages were added 2 weeks ago

what could be wrong?
 
infotech said:
my search console says 70+ urls submitted and indexed. yet when searching `site:buso.com` it only shows 5 urls.

site was launched 4 months ago with about 15 static pages and other pages were added 2 weeks ago

what could be wrong?
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The "site:" query has never been accurate. If you search for the URLs of pages that don't appear when you do a site: search, do they show up? If so, they are indexed as Search Console suggests. The Coverage Report is really accurate in my opinion. Possibly 100% accurate. I'd trust it before a site: search, which Google has told us many times simply isn't accurate.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The "site:" query has never been accurate. If you search for the URLs of pages that don't appear when you do a site: search, do they show up? If so, they are indexed as Search Console suggests. The Coverage Report is really accurate in my opinion. Possibly 100% accurate. I'd trust it before a site: search, which Google has told us many times simply isn't accurate.
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Pages that were added months ago do show up while pages added weeks ago don't.

Google is showing crawl date of 8 Jan for recent pages. Even for the older pages it is showing outdated title/content.

Lets wait and see.

How does Google decide when to crawl the page if they don't contain created at/updated at data? Sitemap change frequency is set to weekly.
 
I am also facing indexing issues on multiple sites
  • One with 100000 traffic
  • One with 1000
  • One which is 4 months old with 300 traffic (140 posts 9 pending indexing and I slowed down publishing rate due to no indexing)
I have tried interlinking, good onpage, quality content, better images and still Google is random about indexing my posts....

I was reading a post on Hallway pages or HTML sitemaps and opinion of Ryuzaki ...so what do you all think about creating a HTML sitemap for improving chances of indexing... or just more patience
 
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