Troubleshooting Google Search Console errors

Once you connect your website to Google Search Console, Google will notify you when some pages are prevented from being indexed in search results. In this guide, we will help you understand your indexing report and when to take action.

In your Google Search Console account, your indexing report lists the pages of your site that aren’t indexed in Google’s search results. To view the pages Google has identified that are not being indexed:

1. Log into the Google Search Console.
2. Ensure the correct property is selected in the dropdown in the upper left corner (if you have connected multiple domains).
3. On the left side, under “Indexing,” select the “Pages” option.
4. Scroll down to the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section to view a list of reasons why pages aren’t indexed, with the number of pages affected shown on the right.
5. Click on any reason to view the specific URLs of your site that are affected.

You may also receive emails from Google highlighting issues they are having with indexing certain pages of your site.

The indexing report will alert you to any pages of your site that aren’t shown in Google search results. However, if some pages are not indexed, it does not necessarily mean there is an issue with your website that you need to fix. For instance, some of your website pages may have been intentionally excluded from being crawled or indexed, so the presence of URLs here is not necessarily a cause for concern.

If Google highlights an indexing error, you can use its tools to identify which specific URL on your site is causing the issue. If the page does not exist or you don’t wish for that page to appear in search results, you can likely ignore the error or request Google to check (validate) it again.

The most common page indexing reasons you might find are:

The message “Alternate page with proper canonical tag” in Google Search Console means that your website may have two or more pages that are similar (maybe the same content but with different URLs). Google doesn’t list duplicate content in their search results, so when they find a version of a page that is similar to another, they’ll select the main URL (called the “canonical”). Examples of pages you might find here include:

• Duplicate homepage URLs (such as yourgroovydomain.com/home when yourgroovydomain.com is the canonical homepage URL).
• AMP URLs (with ?amp appended at the end).
• Other URLs with query parameters denoted by a ? that Google ignores in favor of the URL without the presence of these parameters.

Google often selects the canonical URL automatically, so you don’t need to take action. The URLs shown here confirm that Google understands that a different page is the canonical page that should be indexed, helping Google avoid indexing duplicate content and improving your site’s search ranking.

The message “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Google Search Console means that Google has found a page on your site with the same or very similar content to another page, but Google doesn’t know which version is the main (i.e., canonical) page.

The most common cause of this issue is a misconfiguration in an SEO plugin if you have installed one. Google typically selects the canonical URL automatically, but if not, you may be able to add a canonical tag in the SEO plugin’s settings to help Google know which page should be the primary URL to index in search results.

A noindex tag is a special instruction that tells search engines not to index a particular page. URLs listed here mean that Google is following that instruction, so the page is excluded from search results.

Examples of pages you might find here include:

• Private pages.
• Pages you have requested to not be indexed because you have hidden the page from search engines or used a plugin to exclude the page from search.
• Feed URLs (with /feed/ appended at the end).
• Sharing URLs (such as ?share=facebook appended at the end).

The message “Page With Redirect” in Google Search Console means that when Google tries to visit a specific page on your site, it gets redirected to a different page. Google understands that the original URL isn’t available anymore or has been moved.

If this redirect is intentional, Google will follow the redirect to the new location, and therefore you do not need to take action on the original URL. If it’s not intentional, you may have set up a redirect incorrectly using a redirection plugin.

Pages listed with a 404 error are usually because:

• Google can’t find the page on your site because it was deleted or set to private or a draft. If that was not intentional, you can restore the page publicly.
• The page no longer exists at the same URL that Google initially crawled, perhaps because you changed the URL without setting up a redirect. You can either revert the page back to the original URL or use a redirection plugin to redirect the old URL to the new one.

Pages that are crawled or discovered but not currently indexed are URLs that are publicly accessible but not visible in search results. You’ll find many of these pages are not likely to attract traffic from search engines and therefore are not a priority to include in search engines. Examples of these pages include:

• Image URLs
• Paginated pages (such as /page/4/)
• AMP URLs (with ?amp appended at the end)
• Feed URLs (with /feed/ appended at the end)

If you want any pages listed here to be served on Google, hover your mouse over the URL and select the URL Inspection Tool (the magnifying glass icon). Click on “Request Indexing” to ask Google to list this page in search results.

Your website has a robots.txt file that tells search engines which URLs to look at on your site. Pages that are blocked by the robots.txt file are omitted from search results.

All WordPress.com sites automatically have a robots.txt file configured for search engines, so any URLs listed as blocked by robots.txt are intentional. If you have created a custom robots.txt file, you can edit it using the same method originally used to create it.

For information on other errors and warnings not listed in this guide, visit Google’s Page Indexing report information page to learn more about a particular reason and what to do about it.

WordPress.com can help you connect your website to Google Search Console but cannot assist you with questions related to using Google Search Console or handling crawl errors. We encourage you to consult the information in this guide and the Google Search Console documentation for further help.

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