Solving indexing problems
When you use Google Search Console to get the most out of your website, you will often get a notification from time to time about indexing problems. As a website grows over the years with the addition of pages and posts. Your website may need to be checked from time to time. Here's how to fix this.
Indexing problems can have many causes, from not being able to crawl certain URLs or even resulting in your domain name or page being deleted from Google search results. Something that can of course be a tragedy for your monthly income. That is why it is important to always set an email address within your Google Account that you will receive a notification of directly on the cell phone. So that you are always timely informed.
Experience shows that the notifications that come in via email are often a few days out of date. So try to put Google Search Console check somewhere in your weekly agenda when you are actively working on the website. This can ensure that you can solve potential problems faster.
The tool we use for this - Google Search Console
Google Search Console is something that most people will already be familiar with, however, we will briefly summarize how to use it. Google Search Console allows you to gain further insight into the performance of your website on the Google search and display network. So also Google Discover results can be viewed and improved here.
Google Search Console is free to use and easy to activate for your website. The only thing you need to add is a DNS record, to make sure your website is actually seen as yours. A DNS record is easily added in the control panel, and in the new customer panel also easily from there.
The only thing you need to create a Google Search Console account is an existing Google Account, which you probably already have if you use Gmail, YouTube or other Google services. And if not, you can also create this with a Mail account from MijnHostingPartner.nl within your hosting. This makes sure you have all your website business in one account. Read all about Google Search Console in our previous blog post.
Most common problems
The most common problems are often easy to solve, however there are also some fundamental problems such as speed and mobile speed and user interface that are definitely not easy to solve. Google wants to see that your website is not only suitable for Desktop computers, but also that the website is fully usable on mobile devices. So if the text is too small to read on mobile devices, or if your website is not easy to use on mobile devices. Then it can cause your website to be removed from the Google search results.
Preventing the most common problems often starts during the design of the website and the actual building. Adhere to the following guidelines to avoid problems in the future.
Always choose the fastest hosting
At MijnHostingPartner.nl it is best to choose an SSD package to ensure that your website is the fastest possible. In addition, we recommend that you take a look at our Managed WordPress hosting packages and our .NET Core hosting packages. These are even more configured to provide you with the best hosting depending on the technology.
Make sure you have the right foundation
Just like choosing the right hosting, it is also very important that you do your homework on the technology on which your website is built. Changing a theme or making drastic changes to your website at a later stage can cause a lot of headaches and snags. Therefore it is advisable to check out the experiences of others before choosing a Content Management System, or proceeding with a theme or layout.
Also, making the switch from one Content Management System to another is often a process that takes a lot of time, and can often be quite costly if you hire someone to do it for you. So spend enough time on this in the beginning and listen to different sources for what Content Management System your website is based on. For a lot of websites, we recommend either Umbraco or WordPress. Feel free to stop by the chat to spar with a colleague about this.
How do you solve indexing problems?
Your website is already live and you've been using it for a period of time. Now you get a notification from Google Search Console indicating an error in your website. There are then a number of action items you can take up. First of all, it is important to make sure that your entire website can be read in Google Search Console. You often do this with a sitemap.xml. To read all the tips for this you can also dive into a previous blog post.
Furthermore, it is important to make sure that besides the basic information you try to gather as much as possible about the problem. Then click on the further information within the notification and read the documentation from Google, and in addition search on the notification within a search engine to find out previous experiences of users. And how they solved it. No problem is unique on the Internet.
Once you have identified and corrected the problems you can request a check again from Google to have this corrected. This can sometimes take a day, but often takes a longer period of time. Where the longest is often a month. In that month you can expect lower results from your website. Annoying, but unfortunately it is not otherwise. Before you apply for this, it is important that you take problems seriously and improve them. It may be that if you have not solved the problems properly it can take another month before this is checked again.
