Answered by
Oliver Hall
Google indexing primarily the home page and not other pages of a website can be influenced by several factors. Here's how you can understand and potentially resolve this issue:
Use Google Search Console to check for crawl errors. If Googlebot is encountering issues accessing certain parts of your site, these will be listed here. Common problems include server errors or the accidental blocking of some URLs by a robots.txt file.
Ensure that your robots.txt file isn't inadvertently blocking search engine crawlers from accessing parts of your site other than the home page. The file should be located in your site’s root directory. You can check its contents and test if URLs are blocked using the robots.txt Tester in Google Search Console.
Pages might have meta tags that prevent search engines from indexing them. Look for <meta name='robots' content='noindex'> on individual pages. Removing this tag will allow Google to index these pages.
Submit a clean, comprehensive sitemap to Google via the Search Console. This helps Google understand the structure of your website. Also, ensure your site has proper internal linking—every page should ideally be reachable from at least one static text link.
Incorrect use of the canonical tag can lead to indexing issues. If pages point their canonical tags back to the homepage, Google might consider them duplicates of the homepage and choose not to index them.
Google prefers to index pages that offer unique and valuable content. Make sure the content on your other pages is not thin or duplicated. More substantial content tends to get indexed more reliably.
With Google's mobile-first indexing, your site also needs to be mobile-friendly. A poor mobile design or slow loading times on mobile could hurt your site’s indexing.
If your server is slow or unreliable, it might affect how effectively Google can crawl and index your site. Consider upgrading hosting if your server performance is lacking.
Check Google Search Console for any manual penalties. If there were violations of Google's guidelines, this might affect your site's visibility in search results.
In Google Search Console, use the 'Fetch as Google' tool (located under 'Legacy tools and reports') for requesting a re-crawl of individual URLs. This can help speed up the indexing process for pages that aren’t the homepage.
By addressing these factors, you can improve the likelihood of Google indexing more than just your home page.