Site is properly indexed by Google but almost all blog posts not showing up in search

Matthew_Brooks · October 28, 2022, 5:35pm

I have 61 blog posts in my CMS that have been around for many weeks. They are properly indexed, no issues with robots.txt, sitemap, crawling, etc (none of the 12 pages that aren’t indexed are blog posts, they are pages like http://www.incognitoapps.com/

Yet Google and Bing only have 10 results while Duck Duck Go has all of them.

What can I check to fix this?

Google has access to my sitemap and has crawled and properly indexed every page

Yet Google only shows 10 random results for my blog. The other pages get 0 impressions.

Bing also has only 10 results (some the same as Google, some different)

Duck Duck Go shows them all

If you just Google one of the blog post URLs that isn’t shown initially it does appear in the Google search.

memetican · October 29, 2022, 1:31am

I’ve seen similar behavior in Google with site: searches. I have not heard any explanation as to why they’re incomplete, but my guess is that pagerank is just too low on some of them.

Even though they match the search perfectly, Google is deciding they don’t rank well enough to call attention to.

Interestingly on your search ( site:www.incognitoapps.com/blog ),
I get this-

Even though there are only 12 results actually shown.

You could ask in Google forums, however your best bet is probably to promote those posts… reddit, facebook, partner sites, etc. Get that pagerank above zero.

Seo_Blogging · September 19, 2023, 6:41am

same issue is happening with my site.

dspataro · November 28, 2023, 6:52pm

@Matthew_Brooks @Seo_Blogging Did you end up figuring this out? I’m experiencing the same thing on our site right now.

Harry_Stranger · January 6, 2024, 7:31am

I’m having this same issue and thought I’d do a bump.

memetican · January 6, 2024, 7:49am

@Seo_Blogging @dspataro @Harry_Stranger
I’m not clear on what you’re asking- in Matthew’s post above, he’s seeing 88 of his 100 pages indexed. That’s pretty normal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen 100% on any site in the past year.

Google has gotten pickier.

If GSC is indicating that it’s not indexing pages, than likely they’re low value, meaning the titles, metas, headings and content need some improvement to make them more relevant and indexable.

if you’re trying to say that the site: search isn’t showing you’re results, that’s normal. For awhile it just got picky, e.g. different results for mysite.com v. www.mysite.com v. https://www.mysite.com. Google’s engineers reported in a forum post 3-4 years ago that the site: mechanism really isn’t supported any longer.

Try picking a page that IS showing as indexed in GSC, but IS NOT showing using the site: search qualifier. Look up that page using its full URL using cache: instead. e.g. cache:https://www.mysite.com/blog/donuts-are-awesome You’ll see if it’s indexed.