Is Share Of Pages Not Listed A Unhealthy Google website positioning Signal?

A lot of SEOs focus on the pages Google has indexed versus the pages Google has not indexed on your website. So if there is a larger percentage of not indexed pages, they get concerned.

Should they be concerned? Well, like anything in SEO, it depends.

John Mueller of Google was kind of asked about this on Twitter and said it is not about the percentage and it is normal for sites to have some or many pages not indexed by Google. He said “it’s normal that not all URLs are indexed.”

John said “there is no percentage” when it comes to what is a bad number of pages not indexed. “This is why it’s important to make it easy for folks to navigate through your site so that they can get to places they’re looking for,” John added.

Here is that tweet:

There is no percentage. And yes, it’s normal that not all URLs are indexed. This is why it’s important to make it easy for folks to navigate through your site, so that they can get to places they’re looking for.

— 🌽〈link href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical 〉🌽 (@JohnMu) September 20, 2022

I’m sure many of you disagree. Right?

We have heard from Google before that pages not being indexed, can be a sign of quality issues with the page, although Google said the opposite as well.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

More:

It really depends on the site, the setup, the value. If you have an endless calendar, there are a lot of dates we wouldn’t index, for example, but that’s not necessarily a problem. This is where your experience comes into play: what pages aren’t indexed? what pages are?

— 🌽〈link href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical 〉🌽 (@JohnMu) September 21, 2022