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Several years ago, posts on my site would be indexed very quickly (usually 1-2 days after I publish them). But now, it takes 2-3 months after publish before pages get indexed.

This is not due to low quality content, because once indexed, the posts are well ranked. If I inspect the URLs of not indexed pages in Google Search Console, I find they are discovered (through the sitemap) but never crawled by Google (and of course not indexed.)

Why does this happen?

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  • Is the sitemap the only way to find these URLs or are they linked from other pages?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jul 13, 2022 at 19:52
  • In the last few years have you implemented new technologies with client side rendering for your website?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jul 13, 2022 at 19:52
  • @StephenOstermiller The newly published posts(excerpt) are shown on home page(my Wordpress site is configured to show latest posts on home page) so they get links from home page at least. I did not implement new technologies. The only problem I found in google search console is LCP too long, but I think it only affects ranking not crawling/indexing.
    – peter
    Jul 13, 2022 at 23:55
  • My experience is that if it comes across a page it does not like, perhaps because of errors or content. Then it will never index it. Unless you go to Google Console and tell it to.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Jul 14, 2022 at 1:38
  • @RohitGupta My site has several hundred of posts. Only a few posts are never indexed, and I can understand why google does not like them by analyzing their content. What confuses me is google delays crawling/indexing newly published posts for a long time, although it finally crawls them, indexes them, and ranks them well.
    – peter
    Jul 14, 2022 at 5:44

1 Answer 1

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This issue can be related to external linking. To tell it in detail, the indexing could be triggered by a bot visit through an external link. Like this:

  • Article published,
  • Google discovers it by sitemap,
  • Page has no external links - no indexing,
  • The bot discovers a link to the page anywhere in the web and comes to the page through it,
  • Indexing occures.
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  • By saying external links, do you mean links from other websites? But newly published articles can hardly get such external links, and it was not necessary for indexing in the past. If you refer to external link as a link from another post on the same website, the homepage of the website displays the latest posts so it does have the link.
    – peter
    Sep 21, 2022 at 2:57
  • @peter yes, correct, from other sites. But newly published articles can hardly get such external links, - this is correct too. And this is our main job, to make our sites so valuable, that other link our articles as fast as possible after publishing. Not easy, indeed.
    – Evgeniy
    Sep 21, 2022 at 8:40

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