Hi all,
Just joined and this is my first post so be gentle! Appreciate it's a long one, but any suggestions or insight would be hugely appreciated.
I'm having some issues with some of my newer pages being crawled by Google (first published late Nov/early Dec).
Existing posts are still being crawled without issue, and the new posts are accessible to Google, but it's not crawling them. The pages display correctly when testing the live URL in GSC, so they Google can crawl them, it's just choosing not to.
Website is of fairly high authority, so can usually find posts in SERPs soon after posting.
A bit of context and background:
I have tried changing the URLs and re-requesting indexing, but still no luck
Have checked content quality and no issues with duplication etc, but assuming because Google hasn't even crawled them that content quality can't be part of that decision anyway?
The URLs are not in a sitemap yet (in progress of adding them), however this hasn't caused an issue with other new pages previously
The pages are failing Core Web Vitals, but again the issues are sitewide and it hasn't been an issue with other posts. Could Google have noticed the general poor performance and decided penalise new posts?
PageSpeed Insights isn't giving a score for 'Best Practices' due to the pages not having a character encoding declaration. Again, this is the same with all other pages - is this an urgent issue? Not something I have come across before
Is there anything else to check that I have missed, or is this more likely a buildup of the few issues mentioned above?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Update on this one, the 2 pages are now indexed as of 27th Feb! Hadn't done anything major to them around that time, so no idea what caused the issue or the resolutioin. Very strange one!
Thanks to everyone for their advice.
Hi,
A few questions...
What are your steps when you publish new content? Outside of writing it and publishing, what specifically do you do next?
Also, how large is your website? What CMS are you using?
I'll check back later for your response.
Thanks!
I don't know all of the details but I will tell you to be honest with youreslf about the content quality - I have 100% noticed it is harder to get indexed and most of the time it has been because the content is either FAR FAR too niche or not up to snuff...
Do you have a considerable number of internal links pointing to the new posts? Are the canonicals self-referencing?