x
If you have exact match instances of keyphrases on low-quality pages, mostly these pages won’t have all the compound ingredients it takes to rank high in Google in 2016. I was working this, long before I understood it partially enough to write anything about it. Here are a few examples of taking a standard page that did not rank for years and then turning it into a topic oriented resource page designed around a user’s intent:
Google, in many instances, would rather send long-tail search traffic, like users using mobile VOICE SEARCH, for instance, to high-quality pages ABOUT a concept/topic that explains relationships and connections between relevant sub-topics FIRST, rather than to only send that traffic to low-quality pages just because they have the exact phrase on the page.
Separating the wheat from the chaff.
Being ‘indexed’ is important. If a page isn’t indexed, the page can’t be returned by Google in Search Engine Results Pages.
While getting as many pages indexed in Google was historically a priority for an SEO, Google is now rating the quality of pages on your site and the type of pages it is indexing. So bulk indexation is no guarantee of success – in fact, it’s a risk in 2016 to index all pages on your site, especially if you have a large, sprawling site.
If you have a lot of low-quality pages (URLs) indexed on your site compared to high-quality pages (URLs)…. Google has told us it is marking certain sites down for that. Some URLs are just not welcome to be indexed as part of your website content anymore.
Do I need to know which pages are indexed?
No. Knowing is useful, of course, but largely unnecessary. Indexation is never a guarantee of traffic. Some SEO would tend to scrape Google to get indexation data on a website. I’ve never bothered with that. Most sites I work with have xml sitemap files, so an obvious place to start to look at such issues is Google Search Console.
Google will tell you how many pages you have submitted in a sitemap, and how many pages are indexed. It will not tell you which pages are indexed, but if there is a LARGE discrepancy between SUBMITTED and INDEXED, it’s very much worth digging deeper.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor.
