Assertive Media
Page Indexing Issue Support
At Assertive we offer a page indexing service to help clients who are or have been having issues with page indexing within search engines. We primarily focus on page indexing support for Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex.
Trusted by ambitious brands
What We Offer
We help businesses who have websites that are losing pages from search engine indexes & subsequently losing traffic (and potential traffic) as a result. We help to identify what content isn't being indexed, why and to provide resolution.
We help U-Turn page indexes from losses into growth. Our page indexing SEO service helps clients to have content re-indexed & ranking again.
We also provide a subset of services to help improve indexability such as content clean ups, E-E-A-T/YMYL reviews, content performance, NLP & quality assessments and more.
There's a page de-indexing epidemic going on now that the web is being flooded with everything from "the same content that already exists" through to commodity content through to mass generated AI content. As such, search engines like Google are taking an evergrowing aggressive stance to page indexing which site owners, webmasters and SEOs are seeing with a decrease in indexed content and increase in non-indexed pages (paradoxical).
Client Testimonial
We've been working with Assertive on our SEO & AI SEO Strategy, we're very pleased with the results, the team are fantastic & very helpful
We've been working with Assertive on our SEO + our AI SEO / GEO strategy for a while now. The team have been very knowledgable and supportive.
We had our first wholesale bulk order through chatGPT which is one of the largest orders we've had to date, we're getting more customers telling us they found us in chatGPT searches, so very pleased.
Appletons Wholesale
Verified client
Some of Our Clients
How We Can Help You Like We Have Other Clients
We've helped hundreds of clients globally to fix page indexing issues from simple issues caused by rushed website deployments through to much larger and more complex indexing issues i.e. large eCommerce websites with millions of pages & complex filtering.
We've helped:
- Medium & large eCommerce websites to fix significant indexing issues from non-indexed category pages to product pages not being indexed
- Medium & large eCommerce brands to properly configure filtering, PDPS, URL variable management with robots.txt to reduce index bloat / wasted crawl budget
- Small, medium and large publications to address non-indexed content - helping to cull, clean and archive non-value content, improve indexability of new content and to improve crawl efficiency
- Affiliate sites across a wide range of niches from casino and iGaming through to financial platforms to resolve indexing issues
- Large & corporate organisations running bespoke websites / custom CMS to address indexability issues
- Sites suffering from index degradation to recover and grow organic traffic
Why Addressing Page Indexing Issues Is Important
Quite simply, pages not being indexed is generally a "quality" and "value" indicator. If your website has a growing number of pages not being indexed it generally highlights an issue with content value and/or quality - which can impact broader site performance organically.
Google and other search engines (primarily Google) use site quality as a "sitewide" metric - this looks at the overall composition of a website and the quality of content - so, if your site has lots of content NOT being indexed, that tends to highlight an issue that needs addressing.
Addressing page indexing issues is important because:
- Page indexing issues can be and are generally indicators of content quality issues
- Page indexing issues can impact broader website performance in search
- It's a waste of money - if you've paid for content that's not being indexed it adds no value
- It can impact performance in LLMs and AI search (if your content isn't being indexed than it's less likely to be cited during RAG)
Ready to brief us on your project?
We respond within 1–2 working hours.
Page Indexing Audits
We can audit and evaluate all non-indexed page reasons from Google Search Console data.
We look at and address all non-indexed page reasons, separating benign issues from key issues that need resolving (for example google reporting on alternate page with proper canonical tags is a relatively benign thing to check however pages being blocked by robots.txt could be severe).
The typical non-indexed page reasons include:
- Server error (5xx)
- Redirect error
- URL blocked by robots.txt
- URL marked 'noindex'
- Soft 404
- Blocked due to unauthorized request (401)
- Not found (404)
- Blocked due to access forbidden (403)
- URL blocked due to other 4xx issue
- Crawled - currently not indexed
- Discovered - currently not indexed
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical
- Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
- Page with redirect
Our Page Indexing Audit Checks
We audit each export where there is data to review, we then identify what's not being indexed and why - this means performing a plethora of checks such as:
- HTTP status checks to segment out legacy issues from active ones
- GSC data checks - to see if and what click/impression data exists
- Indexing viability - to assess whether things being blocked should be
- Internal link checks - to see if indexing issues are a result of thin internal linking
- Content depth checks - to rule out thin content, duplicate content, content issues
- Pages canonical states
- Pages accessibility behind directives
- Page external link checks (to see if equity is being wasted or lost)
Page Indexing Issue Resolution + Cleanups
Post audit we can help execute recommendations to clean up non indexed page reasons. Once the issues have been resolved we then submit the non-indexed page reasons for validation.
Clean ups can typically include:
- Culling legacy or non value content
- Blocking low value content that needs to remain
- Adjusting meta robots directives
- Adjusting robots.txt disallow directives i.e. handling specific parameters
- Reviewing canonical configuration
- Consolidating content
- Adjusting or eliminating redirects
- HTTP 410 on content / URLS that's not coming back
- Reducing crawl requests for things that will not be restored
Real client results
Case Studies
Lenovo EMEA
One of the world's largest computer manufacturers Assertive supports search across EMEA markets.
Read Case Study
BNP Paribas Cardif
International insurance group Warranty Direct programme growth via SEO.
Read Case Study
Pharmacy Online
Online dispensary for prescription & over-the-counter medications.
Read Case Study
SCI-MX Nutrition
One of the UK's leading sports nutrition & protein supplement retailers.
Read Case Study
Audley Travel
Tailor-made luxury travel bespoke itineraries crafted by destination specialists.
Read Case Study
Emma Sleep
Award-winning sleep products mattresses, pillows and bedding.
Read Case Study
Orangeries UK
Bespoke orangeries design, manufacture and installation across the UK.
Read Case Study
Justerinis & Brooks
Fine wine & spirits merchant one of the world's oldest, established 1749.
Read Case Study
Craft Irish Whiskey
Ultra-luxury, super-premium Irish whiskey crafted in small batches.
Read Case Study
Sykes Dream Cottages
Dorset's largest holiday cottage agency with 300+ properties.
Read Case Study
Large Mortgage Loans
UK leader in High Net Worth mortgages finance for larger property purchases.
Read Case Study
SQS
Global IT service management & infrastructure software organisation.
Read Case Study
Unstable Rankings Because of Indexing Issues
We help clients who have websites that suffer from ranking instability because of page indexing issues. For example, cannibalisation or pages that are ranked being dropped from the index can have a profound impact on ranking & subsequently website traffic.
We help to restore and smooth out unstable rankings by addressing issues such as:
- Website URLS vanishing from the search index
- Website URLS exhibiting unstable rankings
- Unstable rankings because of cannibalisation / new & legacy competing pages
Indexing Issues Because of Poor Technical Configurations / Website Builds
A lot of indexing issues also occur because search engines do not handle javascript very well. A growing number of websites are using JS tech stacks, some of which come as a website that's built on an application architecture (SPA - single page applications).
We help to identify, fix and rule out technical SEO issues that can impede indexing and subsequently rankings. Common things we fix that impede indexability include:
- ReactJS / SPA shells where content isn't always loaded in the origin DOM - where content is injected in
- CSR rendering issues (Search engines work best with server side rendering as opposed to client side rendering)
- Misconfigured directives (meta robots, robots.txt, canonicals)
- URL handling (consistency, trailing slash vs non trailing slash, HTTPS enforcement)
- Internal link accessibility (JS loaded page elements, dynamic JS events)
AI Content Availability & Coverage Stability
LLMS work differently to search engines like Google and Bing, LLMS (large language models) like chatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc. do not render content the way that search engine bots do - so, we also check for content availability for LLMS by looking at what content is provided in the original DOM - this ensures that the parseable text from the HTML is readable by LLMS and therefore can be used in citation.
How Much Does It Cost?
Page indexing support costs will vary depending on the nature of your indexing issues, size of website and the amount of work we think it will take to resolve. We typically charge £150-£200 per hour for page indexing support and generally require at least 5-10 hours per month for smaller sites and 10-20 hours per month for larger sites.
Fill out our contact form and a member of our team will be able to provide you with a page indexing service cost quotation.
Why Choose Us?
We are specialists in SEO & page indexing, each year we deal with lots of clients who have websites that have indexing issues - it's our bread and butter. We have helped hundreds of websites over the past 17+ years to resolve indexing issues as well as preventing them with strategic guidance.
Reasons why businesses choose Assertive to help with page indexing issues:
- Extensive experience & demonstrated results analysing, fixing and resolving page indexing issues
- Extensive experience with auditing non-indexed page reasons, identifying issues and generating clear, actionable recommendations for resolution
- Each SEO in our team has a minimum of 10 years real world experience
- Client-first, founder led
- Award winning SEO agency
- We have our own proprietary SEO tool (SEO Stack) to track the impact of rendering and indexability fixes
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are my pages showing as "Crawled - currently not indexed"?
The highest-volume real query in this category. Honest answer: Google crawled them but judged them not worth indexing, usually a quality, value, or duplication signal rather than a technical fault.
What's the difference between "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Crawled - currently not indexed"?
People constantly confuse these. Discovered = known but not yet crawled (often crawl-budget/scheduling); Crawled = fetched but withheld (often quality).
Different causes, different fixes.
Can you force Google to index a page?
Answer honestly: no you can request indexing, but you can't compel it. What you can do is fix the underlying reason as to why it's not being indexed by Google.
Will fixing indexing issues bring my rankings/traffic back?
In some cases yes, in some cases no. Ranking recovery is conditional not only on indexing restoration but also general quality indicators too (content quality, NLP, end user intent, domain authority and trust etc).
How long does it take for pages to get re-indexed after a fix?
Days to weeks; validation in GSC typically takes up to ~2 weeks but can be longer. Each case is unique, we keep clients updated on index fixes and changes to indexing performance.
Is it bad to have non-indexed pages?
No, not all pages should be indexed (thank-you pages, filtered variants, thin tag pages). The skill is knowing which non-indexed pages are intentional vs a problem.
Why are my pages being de-indexed / dropping out of the index after previously ranking?
Speaks straight to the "vanishing URLs" pain - quality re-evaluation, cannibalisation, or a technical/rendering regression.
My content is AI-generated - is that why it's not being indexed?
AI content generally gets indexed less by Google because it tends to be a rehash of what already exists on the web and in some cases can be considered "low effort". Google is looking at serving quality content that's unique, something that AI partly gets right but the unique aspect less-so.
Programmatic AI content suffers even more and can lead to spam penalties/manual actions.
Do JavaScript / React sites have more indexing problems?
Generally yes, not always but moreso - this is because depending on how a website is built and served to user-agents like Googlebot can make a stark difference between a site that's JS based being indexable vs one where Googlebot cannot fetch and render the output.
Will non-indexed content affect whether AI tools like ChatGPT cite my site?
Yes more than likely, non indexed content won't show up when LLMS perform RAG searches or query-fan out searches thus reducing the ability for content from your brand to be cited.
Want to grow your business?
Tell us about your business we'll respond within 1–2 working hours.
