Pages Aren’t Indexing On Search Console

Hi Whygames,

I checked your Publication in Google News and I see it’s displaying the ‘no items to show’ message.

If you check in your Publisher Center, are your articles appearing in the preview pane?

Chris

@christopheran Thank you for getting back to me.

Yes, everything appears in the preview. It says it’s live.
You can see a screenshot here.

The RSS feed is working in an RSS app.
Thank you.

Okay, I suspect this is a bug on Google’s end.

If your preview pane is working, that would be proof that your articles are being crawled okay and that your feed is working correctly.

I notified Google of this issue some time ago. It affects a limited number of publishers. At this point they have not confirmed, denied, nor fixed the issue.

I recently reminded them again that this is an ongoing issue and am waiting to hear back from them. Right now I don’t think there is anything you can do on your end to fix it, we’ll just have to wait for now…

Chris

@christopheran I see thank you for your reply.

It seems that my preview isn’t even loading today.

But maybe this is all my fault.
Originally I migrated my site to its new domain (backed up and re-uploaded).
Yesterday I removed all contents from the old site. And now this morning the preview for the new site doesn’t work.

Could there be issues with having moved my site?

All links were updated and the RSS feed works.
This is my new site.

EDIT:
Less than 15 minutes later the feed preview has returned…
I’m so puzzled and don’t know what to do. Search Console still has no data.

UPDATE:
Not sure if relevant, but I tried to Live Test the GN Feed URL and it says indexing requested rejects. Screenshot here.

And the reason appears to be something to do with “Excluded with NoIndex Tag”.
Screenshot here.
Maybe these aren’t supposed to be indexed though? I’m not sure.
Thanks.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by whygames.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by whygames.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by whygames. Reason: spelling
• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by whygames.

Hi WhyGames,

Correct, rss feeds aren’t ‘indexed’, that’s normal.

If your articles are appearing in the preview pane okay now, and displaying new stories as you publish (or soon thereafter), then I would say Google is crawling the feed okay and that the ‘no items to show’ is an issue on their end. I’m still pushing that issue with them.

If the preview pane stops working again, try running your feed through the rss validator: https://validator.w3.org/feed/

It will need to validate without any html warnings. Other warnings (script/css/iframe related warnings) can be ignored, because the Publisher Center ignores them… but html errors cause problems. If there is an html error, it’s usually due to some improper coding in a plugin that’s generating some of the content in the article,

Chris

@christopheran Thank you again for your insight.

Yes, things are now appearing in the preview.
And fortunately the Feed validates just fine.

It’s more so that they aren’t being crawled on Google Search Console that’s bothering me. Despite being “Live”.
The only page that is noted as valid is the homepage.
Every other page is listed as invalid or excluded on purpose.

I will check Google Search Console and Google News again tomorrow.

I wouldn’t worry about the status of the feed url in the Search Console, we know it is being fetched and the articles included in your preview pane, so it’s being crawled okay.

> Every other page is listed as invalid or excluded on purpose.

If you are talking about article pages being listed as invalid or excluded on purpose, that would be a concern. Is that what you mean?

Chris

@christopheran Thank you again for your reply. Sorry for the late response.

For Pages being listed as invalid or excluded, I mean that in Google Search Console all of my pages are being discovered, but not indexed.

When you click on the graph, it lists them and says “Status: Excluded”.

And they’re not appearing in Google News app, even though they appear in the preview on Google News Publisher Center.

I have successfully made one page appear by manually requesting indexing though.

Thank you for your in-sight.

It looks like your articles are being indexed by Google now, did you figure out what was causing the issue?

Chris

Good evening @christopheran.

No, I’m still a bit confused. It seems some are being crawled and others aren’t.
For example 3 recent articles, but only 2 appear.

It seems to help if I log into Google Console and manually request indexing.
Obviously this isn’t ideal, so hopefully it improves.

I’m not doing anything different on my end.
Thanks again for reaching out.
I’ll be sure to update this post should anything happen.

Hello @christopheran
As promised, here’s an update.
Articles have stopped being crawled again. So I’ve requested it manually in Search Console.
Hopefully this helps update it.

It may be that Google is just prioritizing some content over other content. John Mu has been saying that Google doesn’t index everything. I know that’s not a very satisfactory answer though.

I could do a full site audit and really dig in and look for any issues if you would like. I do have to charge for that though. You can contact me at [email protected] if you want to consider that,

Chris