Blog posts are not indexed by Google

[Remo_Gisler]

Hello all

I have read quite a bit, but have not gotten anywhere. We have two blogs on our site:

https://aniswiss.ch/blogs/prof-wuff

https://aniswiss.ch/blogs/fipo

When I call site:https://aniswiss.ch/blogs/ I can't find the blog posts at https://aniswiss.ch/blogs/. Also on Google Search Console the pages are excluded:

Note:<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> is in there for all blog posts.

According to my research I can't change Robots.txt, then do I have to index each blog post individually and then the new ones too?

Best thanks for your support and help!!!

Remo

[GFDLuke]

Hey @Remo_Gisler, when I try to go to aniswiss.ch/blogs/ I receive a 404 error. Do you have a page for the parent page /blogs/ ? If not, I would create a page that links to both of your blogs. You don't need to have the parent page listed on the navigation bar, but Googlebot could be getting stuck without there being a parent /blogs/ page.

I hope this helps. If it does, please give me a Like to show your support!

[Remo_Gisler]

Thanks for pointing that out @GFDLuke . No, I am not aware of that, that it needs a parent page. I have both blogs linked through the navigation.

Deep links:

https://aniswiss.ch/blogs/prof-wuff
https://aniswiss.ch/blogs/fipo 

Can I have a simple page with links that points to both blogs (links above)? Does the page need to be visible - think so, for it to be indexed? And does it solve the problem with the blog posts not being indexed?

Thank you very much for your support! I appreciate it very much

[GFDLuke]

@Remo_Gisler, when I first read your post, I was unable to decipher the GSC images you shared due to them being in German (I am a native English speaker). With some help from Google Translate, I now understand that your pages that are listed in the GSC screenshot are listed as Excluded, Discovered - not currently indexed. This means that Google put it into the queue to be indexed but hasn't gotten to it yet. Normally, these pages may be indexed later but you may want to reindex them in a few weeks if that is not the case. Sometimes, Google's algorithm can mark pages with low PageRank as not "worthy" of being indexed because it doesn't think it will match enough search inquiries. This is rare for pages with some content on them but it does happen.

That being said, my initial recommendation was off base and you do not need to create a parent page for the blogs! (It might help with some internal links and not having a /blogs/ parent page not come up as a 404 error, but it is not necessary!)

Tl;dr Google has put your blog posts into the queue, you do not need a parent page (but it might help)

Sorry for any confusion I may have caused! Please let me know if you have any further questions about this.

[mojoe]

Hello Remo_Gisler, 

Did you solve your problem finally? I am facing the same issue... 

Thanks!

[remogisler]

Not really. I add to each page individually via Google Search Console. Have also not yet found a way how I can change you Robots.txt. How do you solve the problem?

Regards Remo

[mojoe]

Thank you for your reply Remo, 

I couldn't solve the issue either. Seems Google is very slow to index right now.

These articles are quite instructive on bots : 

https://increasily.com/how-to-edit-shopify-robots-txt-file/?cn-reloaded=1#Where_is_the_Shopify_Robot...

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/create-robots-txt 

Let me know if you find a way 🙂

[Trevor]

Hello!

Just a quick update about the robot.txt file that was referenced in this post. As of today, June 21st, 2021, we have launched the ability to edit the robot.txt file to give merchants more control over the information that is crawled by search engines. You can learn more about how to edit your robot.txt file through our community post here. 

If you have any questions about the new feature, please do not hesitate to create a new post under our "Techincal QA" board.