Duplicate content and thin content are two common indexing issues to look out for:

Duplicate Content and Canonical Issues

A search engine may recognize some of your pages as duplicate content, even if you didn’t mean for that to happen. Duplicate content is content that’s similar to or exact copies of content on other websites or on different pages on the same website. Having large amounts of duplicate content on a website can negatively impact search engine rankings.

Canonical issues most commonly occur when a website has more than one URL that displays similar or identical content (duplicate content). They’re often the result of not having proper redirects in place, though they can also be caused by syndicating or publishing content on multiple sites.

If you do have duplicate content, there are two main ways to fix it, which are most effective when both are implemented:

1. Use a 301 redirect. This will permanently redirect the old page to a new, live site page.
2. Add canonical tags to your site’s pages to tell search engines which of several similar pages is preferred. A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. 

Taking these steps will help you make sure that the same pages on your site aren’t competing against each other for views, clicks, and links.

Thin Content and Its Impact on Indexing

Thin content is website content that provides little to no value to customers. It’s lacking in depth, structure, and/or quality. When a search engine finds your content thin, it can demote or remove it from search rankings, and in extreme cases, it can deindex your entire site.

You can make thin content richer by implementing a keyword research strategy that is tailored to meet the needs of your audience. You can also combine thin pages with other ones on similar topics or search intent to add more value. Another option is to repurpose older unique content into more valuable formats by adding components such as infographics or videos.

If you find any unhelpful, irrelevant pages that aren’t getting any traffic, redirect them to other pages or delete them. 

Indexing vs. Crawling: Clarifying the Difference

People often confuse indexing with crawling but they’re two different things. Where crawling is the discovery of pages and links that lead to more pages, indexing is storing, analyzing, and organizing the content and connections between pages found from crawling. There are parts of indexing that help inform how a search engine crawls.

Both crawling and indexing are necessary for search engines to properly rank pages and are significant factors in SEO.

Monitoring and Ensuring Proper Indexing

It’s critical that your webpages are indexed properly for users to find your site when searching online for products, services, or information you can help them with. Since proper indexing is so important, you’ll want to create procedures to perform periodic checks for index coverage of your pages and deal with any potential issues that are discovered.

You can have site administrators check the last time content was indexed and monitor the status of crawl jobs. You can also stop any crawl job that’s running, cancel the next scheduled crawl before it starts, or rerun a failed crawl.

If users report search issues, check the status of crawls to ensure they’re current. Note that after a crawl is completed, users might have to wait a few minutes before they can locate the latest content.

Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content on a page for indexing and ranking. This makes the mobile-friendliness of a website an extremely important factor for proper indexing, as well as for ranking. A mobile-friendly website is more likely to have higher visibility in the search results on mobile devices, leading to increased traffic and conversions.