I want more people to come to the website.

Currently - most (144 out of 179) of the pages on this website aren’t indexed. That means that google knows about them but doesn’t consider them important enough to add to the search database.

Chart showing 35 of my pages are indexed and 144 aren't

Broadly, nobody knows for sure how to solve this problem. The most common suggested solutions are sitemap related, but mine has been double checked.

Sitemap has been recently checked and loads fine

My page experience is fine, and all other indicators are good:

All indictors are 'Good'

To find out more I exported the lists of pages that are index and pages that aren’t to a google doc

After I looked at both lists, several things jumped out:

  • Posting a link to twitter didn’t predict if google was going to index it.
  • All links that I posted to Facebook did appear in the index.
  • All pages that were linked to from one of my popular pages appeared in the index.

The last two didn’t cover all the pages.

So, there are two obvious next moves.

  • I’ve added eight unindexed links in total to my three most popular pages.
  • I’ve posted two different unindexed links to facebook.
    • https://joereddington.github.io/2021/01/28/Finder-Zero-You-use-far-fewer-files-than-you-think,-so-stop-hoarding-them.html
    • https://joereddington.github.io/2016/06/08/the-dvoark-keyboard-layout-and-what-i-learned/html

I’ll check back in a week and see if anything changed.

At the same time, when poking around the Google Search Console. I found a button that said “Do you want to validate the missing 140 links” and I was like… “Um, okay”, so I’ve pressed that button and we’ll see if it makes any difference.

Validation progress hasn't started yet

EDIT: I checked in on the 8th September: the coverage was unchanged.