Google not enlisting our root page

Google not enlisting our root page - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about google-search-console, google-search, sitemap, homepage to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Google not enlisting our root page.Problem :

The structure of our angularjs site is like

/
/main
/page1
...
/page9

where / is redirecting to /main. So we have 10 pages and Google lists 10 pages like

www.ourpage
ourpage/page1
...
ourpage/page9

We're redirecting away the www prefix, so www.ourpage redirects to ourpage/main. Listing the former in the search results makes more sense and so far, everything looks good.

We're also providing a sitemap.xml containing our 10 pages. On the page https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list, Google shows that 10 pages were submitted, but only 9 were indexed. I doubt it's a real problem, but I'd like to get some insight as others believe it could be a problem. The non-counted page is most probably the root page. I've tried three variants, each of them containing the 9 "normal" pages and one of

• ourpage/main


• ourpage/


• www.ourpage/

and resubmitted the sitemap, but nothing has changed. We always get 9 indexed out of 10.

Note that there's nothing wrong with our pages, especially the root page scores 97/100 in https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights and there are no issues.

• May this be a real problem?


• Can we solve it without providing replacing /main by /?

Solution :

Google follows the 301, 302, 306, 307 commands as expected. Such intermediate pages are not considered useful, though, and thus Google indexes them but does not show you such pages in its results. It makes more sense to send users directly to the destination, don't you think? This, of course, means that changing the main page once in a while will take a little time to get updated at Google (i.e. if you /main were to become /home.)

Now, it would be best if you could avoid that /main altogether and use / instead. "Just" display the contents of /main when users go to / and if you change that to /home later, Google will still point to your home page anyway! (since you'd be showing the contents of /home when a user is accessing /.)

Note that Google is likely to check your home page (/) once in a while either way. That way they can make sure that the redirection did not change. Actually, I have many 404 generated by Google for pages that I have removed so long ago I cannot even remember... They recheck any page that existed at some point in time, they are likely to check / out over and over again. If it "Re-appears" they are not unlikely to re-add it to their index fairly quickly.

So in other words, you're fine, but it could be a bit better. If that main page path is unlikely to change, or will change very rarely, then I wouldn't worry about it.

If the issue about google-search-console, google-search, sitemap, homepage is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.