Pages are not indexed in Google

[nekitonn]

Hi there!
I was trying to resolve this issue via WeWeb support, but they didn’t manage to really help me.

In a nutshell, none of my pages are indexed by Google (aside from Homepage) for weeks if not months.
Google Search Console, when manually tested, shows that it can Crawl these pages and no issues are found. But then it still doesn’t add these pages to the indexing queue nor shows any errors.

We’ve uploaded a Sitemap directly to Google, but it didn’t help. Even though it shows correct amount of pages here.

One issue I see, that is when I go to Sitemap directly, it’s loaded as HTML in browser, not like XML file.
WeWeb’s Sitemap:

Other sitemaps:

Have anybody had this kind of issue before when building on WeWeb?

[Quentin]

Hey

HTML sitemaps are read by Google like XML ones (it’s actually a XML sitemap, but encoded as a string).

We plan on letting you update the WeWeb sitemap in a few weeks.

In the meantime, page should be indexed. Did you add a “nofollow” rule in your pages metadata or head? If not, are they dynamic collection pages?

[nekitonn]

No, they are not dynamic and have no “noindex” tags.
All SEO tools don’t show any critical errors or reasons why they’re not indexed.

[Quentin]

Maybe is this just Google taking time to index them.

When a site is new or unknown, Google gives it a low priority and doesn’t crawl it 100%. Over time, Google will crawl it more and more.

For how much time was the site up and running? Also, how many pages are we talking about?

[nekitonn]

Website is around 5 months old, we added new pages around 1 month ago and they’re still not indexed.
We dig into it a little bit, and it looks like new pages are not only not indexed, but not even discovered.
So when we manually submit them for indexing, Google shows that pages are not known to Google.

Search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing has these pages indexed.

[Quentin]

That’s really weird then, as DuckDuckGo and Bing use the same logic as Google to discover new pages, be it by crawling the app or through the sitemap.

Did you try outreaching Google to ask them? That seems to be an issue on their side then

(I previously worked in SEO, and have never seen an issue like this, sorry I can’t help more )

[nekitonn]

We wrote a post on Google Webmasters forum, but nothing helped yet.
Is there any chance I can send you a custom Sitemap to upload under our domain?

[nekitonn]

@Quentin
I think we’ve found an issue.
Hreflangs are generated automatically on pages.
Urls here are relative and without trailing slashes

This causes 301 redirects for Google crawler when testing without trailing slash

And hreflang errors when testing normal URL

Is there a way to remove hreflangs from our website or fix them?

EDIT:
I tried to turn languages off, then my URL just disappeared and in published project was redirecting to 404.

[Davy]

Hey there, any update on this issue?

[nekitonn]

We ended up transferring our Landing part of the site to Worpdress and leave WeWeb part on a subdomain.
Issue still persisted though, so we changed our domain to a similar one and fully redirected all existing pages to a new domain.
Now pages are indexed. It seems it was some kind of Google Filter on our site.

[Davy]

thank you for the feedback. Hopefully we will manage to resolve it.

[jhonnmadal]

your pages aren’t being indexed due to a potential issue with your sitemap format or the way Google is interacting with it. The fact that the sitemap loads as HTML instead of XML could be a key issue, as Google expects XML for indexing. You should make sure that the sitemap is properly formatted in XML and submitted to Google Search Console. Additionally, check if the “noindex” directive is mistakenly applied to any pages in your site’s meta tags or robots.txt file, as this can prevent indexing. You might also want to try submitting individual URLs via the “URL Inspection Tool” in Google Search Console to push for indexing. If these steps don’t help, consider reaching out to WeWeb support again with this specific concern, as it could be related to how the platform generates or serves the sitemap.