Does AngularJS make it more likely that URLs will be "Discovered - currently not indexed " in Google Search Console?

Question

According to What can cause "Discovered - currently not indexed" in the new GWT

This status means that the google doesn't think the content should be indexed.

In our case, this an NG (Angular) page which loads the content after the page is displayed (like any NG app).

My guess is that google see it as an empty page (although the Fetch as Google tools show the correct content of the page).

I'm bewildered about this issue, since AFAIK Google support JS, and I would expect it will support NG (being a Google tool).

The question is: Is there a way to make Google index NG page?

NOTE: our site is an ecommerce, and the NG pages simply showing category data, and product data

I tried to download the list of urls from Google site, it download only 1K out of 2.26K urls

In the download list, I could see only product pages, but when I searched Google I couldn't find the category pages

Answer 1

For angular apps SEO is quite different. Check Deliver search-friendly JavaScript-powered websites (Google I/O '18)

Google can't render JavaScript.

Use fetch and render option in search console which might shows white blank pages for Angular applications. Also check with Google mobile friendliness test.

Answer 2

Regarding "Discovered - currently not indexed" you can find descriptions at Googles Webmaster Answers:

Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.

Discovered - currently not indexed: The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google tried to crawl the URL but the site was overloaded; therefore Google had to reschedule the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.

Both are listed as "unclear status" on Google's Search Console page. It doesn't mean that Google thinks the content should be indexed. It is just queued (reasons unknown to us). The crawled status is just one step ahead of indexing.

Correctly rendered "Fetch as Google" is a good first step to indexing. However, I myself recognized with a React App that "Fetch as Google" doesn't guarantee that crawling/indexing is working. It seems like "Fetch as Google" is waiting longer for AJAX calls to finish while the Google indexer is a bit lazy and doesn't wait for the calls to finish.

I guess you are using the new Google Search Console. Is there, perhaps, at least one page indexed? You can check this by going to: "index coverage" and searching for valid links. There you can look at the source of the page as Google has used for indexing. If the source is as expected everything should be fine.

Answer 3

If "Fetch as Google" shows the content then Googlebot can see and index the content. It just chooses not to. It usually boils down to one of two things:

1. Your pages are low quality
2. Your pages don't have many links to them
3. Your pages have duplicate content.

For category listing pages I would expect Google to treat them as low quality. Category pages that list many products are very similar to search engine result pages. Google has long said that they don't want to index pages that look like search results. It is a bad user experience for users to click from the Google search results only to find themselves looking at another page where they have to choose from a list of pages.

For product pages, it is very common to sell the same products listed elsewhere on the web. Product titles, descriptions, specifications, images, and manuals can't all be the same as on other sites. Your site need unique content such as your own commentary or unique user reviews.

This likely has nothing to do with AngularJS and everything to do with those types of pages and the low popularity of those pages in terms of inbound links.