Hi everyone,
I'm seeking some advice for my news website. After making some configuration changes, our main canonical homepage was finally confirmed as indexed in GSC ("URL is on Google") around May 27th. However, despite this progress, we still only have a total of 9 pages indexed after several months, which is a significant and pressing concern (Cause we have around 300 pages of articles and news).
What's particularly puzzling is that we have another website in the same category, with a similar (even slightly higher) number of visitors and essentially the same technical configuration (including the use of 308 redirects), and it didn't experience any such indexing delays or low page counts from the start.
I'm trying to understand GSC's reporting for pages that aren't indexed on my current site:
- Crawled - currently not indexed: These are a couple of utility files/backend-related URLs not intended for public indexing.
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag: This is an admin area login page, correctly using 'noindex'.
- Page with redirect: These are non-canonical versions (HTTP, non-www) that all correctly use 308 permanent redirects to their canonical HTTPS www equivalents.
- Not found (404): These are a couple of old article URLs we've intentionally removed.
My understanding is that these configurations on my site are mostly intentional and correct. However, GSC continues to list them, and I get "validation failed" emails for the "Page with redirect" category (presumably because the URLs still redirect, as intended).
My Main Questions for the Community:
1. Is it normal for GSC to persistently flag these intentionally configured items (like correct redirects or 'noindex' pages) and send "validation failed" notices for them, even when the underlying canonical pages are fine?
2. I was recently told by someone described as an SEO expert that our use of 308 redirects (instead of 301s) on my site could be a key reason why only 9 of our pages are indexed site-wide, even after the recent homepage fix. This is the core of our indexing problem. My understanding was that Google treats 308s and 301s similarly for indexing.
- Could 308 redirects genuinely be the primary cause for such an extremely low number of indexed pages compared to 301s?
- Given our other site with 308s performs fine, what are your experiences or thoughts, especially when a site exhibits a stubbornly low indexed page count like ours (just 9 pages)?
Any insights on why so few pages (only 9!) might be indexed on this specific site despite the recent homepage indexing and our other similar site having no issues, how to interpret GSC's handling of these "issues," or the 308 vs. 301 debate would be incredibly helpful.
Thanks!
