Google is not indexing my site - what can I do?
If you struggle to get your Framer website on Google, there might be an underlying issue. Here are the most common problems preventing your website from being indexed on Google and how to solve them.
This troubleshooting guide presumes you've already set up Google Search Console for your website and submitted it to Google but are experiencing indexing errors. If not, read our guide here on how to do that.
Considerations
Not all pages will be indexed.
Getting (and keeping) all pages indexed on Google can require a lot of work and might not even be attainable, especially for larger sites.
Solving problems takes time.
Once you solve the problem and submit a reconsideration request, it will take a few days for Google to validate your request. There’s not much you can do during this period, so it’s better to wait and see if the issue gets solved.
Finding problematic pages
The first step in solving indexing issues is identifying which pages are affected. To do that, access the indexing report from Google Search Console:
Log in to your GSC account.
Go to Indexing > Pages.
Scroll to the bottom to see a report of all non-indexed URLs and the reasons behind it.
If you don’t know what those errors mean, don’t worry—we’ll break down each of them and provide solutions.
Non-Indexing reasons and how to deal with them
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Cause: A ‘noindex’ tag is present, usually added during development and forgotten when deploying to the live site.
Solution: Go to your page’s settings and check the box that says “show this page in search engines.” Then, submit the URL for indexing using the URL inspection tool in GSC.
Blocked due to unauthorized request (401)
Cause: The page is protected by the built-in password protection functionality.
Solution: Pages behind password protection can’t (and shouldn’t) be indexed. If you later choose to remove the password protection, remember to submit the URL via Google Search Console as Google might not crawl those pages as often.
Soft 404
Cause: The server returns a 200 response code for a non-existent page.
Solution: This will only happen for your 404 page, which you do not want to be indexed anyway, so you don’t have to worry about this.
Page with redirect
Cause: If a page has a redirect, then it won’t indexed. That’s because it doesn’t provide any value to the user as they immediately get redirected to another page.
Solution: Check the redirect rules in your site’s settings and adjust as needed.
Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
Cause: Google sees two pages as duplicates and indexes only one. This can happen both for two pages under your domain or even for an external page (e.g. Google sees your page as a duplicate of another page on the internet)
Solution: The only way to get both pages indexed is to make both pages’ content unique. If you don’t care about having both pages indexed but still want to get rid of the error, you can remove one of the pages, noindex one of the pages, or overwrite the canonical tag of one of the pages to make it point to the other page.
Discovered - currently not indexed
Cause: Google knows about your page but hasn’t crawled it yet.
Solution: If the problem only affects a handful of pages, wait; it will probably fix itself in a few days. If the issue affects a large chunk of your pages, feel free to write a support post in our community, and one of our product specialists will happily look into it.
Crawled - currently not indexed
Cause: Google knows about your page and has crawled it but deliberately chose not to index it. Pointing to a specific cause can be challenging as this issue can be related to content quality, indexing limitations, internal linking issues, algorithmic penalties, etc.
Solution: If the problem only affects a handful of pages, wait; it will probably fix itself in a few days. If the issue affects a large chunk of your pages, feel free to write a support post in our community, and one of our product specialists will happily look into it.
Manual penalties
Cause: Your site has been found to have violated Google’s guidelines. While manual penalties usually result in a steep drop in traffic, they can also result in the deindexing of some affected pages (or even the whole domain).
Solution: Remove the problematic content and/or disavow the bad links that caused the penalty in the first place. Then, submit a reconsideration request through GSC.
Conclusion
A page can be excluded by the index for various reasons, most of which have been covered in this article.
If you have already followed the steps above and are still experiencing the issue, please create a support ticket here.