Most websites that publish a lot of content will have articles or pages that Google has crawled but refuses to index.

Sometimes these are things like /page/7/ and /archives/page/2/ which isn't a big issue and certainly isn't what I'm talking about.

Over time you will find that a lot of actual content ends up unindexed. It's a waste of investment, but there's also the chance there that it'll lower any sitewide quality score because they usually refuse to index things they believe aren't worthy of their index in some way.

What makes content not worth indexing?

So what makes content not worth indexing? It can be the quality of the writing or the information itself.

This usually isn't the problem for most serious publishers though.

Instead, it seems to often be a case of presentation.

Recently, optimizing eleven unindexed articles on one of my sites I found the following allowed them to get indexed within 24-48 hours after letting them know I'd updated the page in Google Search Console.

• Adding more images
• Numbering headings
• Changing the page title to be more concise

That's it.

Something like 70-80% of those posts all I did was add more images. Just one to two images on each.

A couple of others I was certain had enough images already, so I focused on what I'd felt were the next big issues from a presentation standpoint.

A page title that specified the number of items without the sub-headings being numbered. Seems silly, right? I've learned Google can be fickle. So that got tested and worked!

Then making the page title more concise fits with the current guidelines and best practices. Since the page title is a power factor you should always consider it as a potential source of problems when a page isn't indexing or ranking the way it should.

All of these things could be considered presentation based on some level, so to me, I've got to say that if you have some content that won't index?

Start looking at the way the content is presented and not the content itself.

Assuming you know the content itself is actually good, that is.