Getting Google to index a page

Google suddenly wasn’t indexing one of my pages – ironically, my “SEO Copywriter” page – and it was knocking my ranking for that keyword phrase. But I’ve made some changes and – voile – the page has indexed once more.

What to do when Google snubs you?

Sudden drop for “SEO Copywriter”

I check the Google rankings of my clients and my own sites on an almost daily basis. So I was alarmed during a routine check to find that I had suddenly dropped from a ranking of 3 or 4 on “SEO Copywriter” to 9. And when I looked at the pages listed on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), neither of them were the “SEO Copywriter” page. How weird.

Google wasn’t indexing the “SEO Copywriter” page

When I checked what Google was indexing (in a Google search field enter site:yourdomain.com), the “SEO Copywriter” page was missing. Yet it was indexing two child pages off that parent – “What is SEO” and “SEO Tools”. Why?

Why isn’t Google indexing my page?

Google can be capricious. It can not index your page for a bunch of reasons. But generally it’s because it doesn’t think that this page adds anything to the world’s collective knowledge. It could form this high and mighty opinion because …

• your page title is the same as other page titles
• your meta tags are the same as other pages
• your h1 tag is the same as other pages
• your page’s content is too similar to other pages

However, in my case, this wasn’t true. The page was unique for my site in every regard. So what else could it be?

Was it something I said?

If Google doesn’t like an inbound link to your site, it will mark you down, but again this was unlikely. So I looked at the content and found that on this page I had made a couple of references that Google might not have liked. Without wanting to repeat the content exactly, I made a reference to Spamming and to a certain landmark event in the way Google ranked pages. Could this have been the problem? I wasn’t taking any chances. I revised the content. But how to get Google to re-index the page?

Getting Google to index the SEO Copywriter page

Apart from getting rid of content that I thought Google might have found offensive, I revised the first paragraph to make it distinctly different to other pages. I also found a 301 Redirect I’d set up from /seo-sydney/ to /seo-copywriter-sydney/ wasn’t working and fixed that. But how long would it take Google to get back to look at this site? I wasn’t going to sit on my hands waiting.

In-bound links to the missing page

I have the Web Copywriter site listed on a few reputable online business indexes. In order to get Google to take notice of the SEO Copywriter page, I changed the URLs on a couple of these sites from the home page to the SEO Copywriter page. I asked one of my clients to alter the link as well, but then this morning I got some good news.

SEO Copywriter is back

When I checked which pages were indexed this morning, the SEO Copywriter was back. And so was my ranking. I am now back at 4 for SEO Copywriter and 2 for SEO Copywriter Sydney. Tellingly, the pages listed on the SERP now include the SEO Copywriter page. What made the difference?

Try an inbound link to cure a Google indexing problem

Who knows. It could have been the removal of the Google references. It might have been making the content more different. It might have been fixing the 301 Redirect. But my money is on the inbound-links. If pages on reputable sites are linking to a page that Google hasn’t deemed worthy of indexing, it is surely going to give it cause to think again. The unease I was feeling while I was being blanked by Google has now dissipated. Now I can get back to worrying about other stuff.