Poor website indexing is a common reason why search engines stop showing pages, even if their content is high-quality. Below are the main signs to look out for and how to quickly identify what's wrong. 1) There are significantly fewer pages in the search than expected One of the most noticeable signs is a decrease in the number of indexed pages compared to the site's history or forecast (for example, after a migration, CMS change, or structure update). If the number of pages drops without an obvious reason, it's almost always a reason to check accessibility, indexing rules, and crawl quality. 2) No organic traffic for non-branded queries When a site receives almost no impressions or clicks for non-branded queries, the reason may be that the pages aren't indexed or aren't ranking due to technical factors. Even if the content exists, search engines must first correctly index the pages. An additional marker: the reports show that many URLs have a "deactivated" or "not indexed" status due to technical reasons. 3) There are many URLs with indexation errors in Google Search Console In Search Console, check indexing-related sections: page status, exclusion reasons, and related crawl issues. Typical signals include pages that: blocked by robots.txt or indexing rules; have problems with canonicals; return server errors (e.g. 5xx) or do not return the correct response code; marked as "alternate page with canonical" and the wrong URLs are actually selected. If reports show that such reasons are widespread, indexing is systematically "broken" rather than limited to a single page. 4) Crawling issues: crawl budget and response speed Even with proper markup, pages may not be indexed quickly if search engines have difficulty crawling the site. In practical terms, this manifests itself in new/updated URLs taking a long time to appear in the index, and server responses are slow or unstable. It's worth checking for logical causes: excessive nesting, redirect cycles, duplicate content, excessively long loading times, and rendering errors (if the page depends on JavaScript and content is not rendered immediately). 5) Robots.txt and meta tags are unintentionally blocking indexing A very common situation is when a site is configured so that some pages are excluded from the index due to developer expectations, but this is carried over to production. For example, robots.txt rules are enabled that block access to important URLs, or pages contain directives like noindex . Check your canonical tags separately: if the canonical points to a different URL or to a page that is excluded, the search engine may not include the desired address in the index. 6) No/poorly configured sitemap and it does not reflect the actual structure If the XML sitemap is missing, outdated, or includes URLs that shouldn't be indexed, the effect will be counterproductive: Search Console will flag inconsistencies, and the crawler will waste resources on "inappropriate" URLs. A good practice is to update the sitemap and ensure that it only includes pages that should actually be indexed. It is also important that the sitemap does not contain massive duplicates and pages with response errors (404/410/5xx). What to do first If you suspect poor indexing, the quickest way to start is usually to run diagnostics through Search Console: find the most common "excluded/not indexed" reasons, then check URL availability, canonicals, and robots.txt rules. Next, fix issues at the template level (tags, redirects, server responses), update the sitemap, and give the search engine time to re-crawl. The results are helpful for tracking trends: whether the number of valid URLs in the index is growing and whether the reasons for exclusion are decreasing.