Opening this category with the sequence I use. The label names a symptom rather than a cause, and the causes have to be separated in a fixed order. Otherwise you test the same theory twice and learn nothing.
First, discovery. Is the URL in a sitemap, and does anything internal link to it? A page reachable only from a sitemap is a page the crawler has little reason to fetch often.
Second, access. Fetch the URL and read the response headers rather than the page. A 200 carrying a noindex header behaves nothing like a 200 without one, and the difference never shows in a browser.
Third, rendering. Compare the source HTML against the rendered DOM. If the content exists only after hydration, the crawl and the render are two separate events with a gap between them, and the gap is where pages get lost.
Fourth, canonical choice. Check what the page declares, what the sitemap declares, and what the internal links point at. Three answers that disagree is a decision handed to the search engine.
Fifth, quality measured against the template's own siblings rather than against the web. If forty pages on one template sit unindexed while two hundred older pages on the same template are fine, the template is not the problem and the forty have something the two hundred do not.
Here is where it runs out for me. All five pass, the pages have been live for weeks, the copy is unique and substantial, and they still sit. At that point I am guessing rather than diagnosing.
What do you check sixth?
Swiss Knife SEO ModeratorsModeration team