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Google doesn't seem to realize that there are links on my page.

I don't yet have provided a sitemap, and I know that I should (and I will).

Regardless, I'm trying to figure out whether I've done something fundamentally wrong with my site/links so that Google does not want to accept them.

  • The links in the main navigation are like this:

    <a href="/en/learn"><div class="material-icons-outlined"></div>LEARN</a>

  • The links are not created via JS. They are served on the initial html.

  • I have not provided a robots.txt (as I want everything to be crawled).

  • I have not added a rel="nofollow" to those links.

Why I think that Google didn't just crawl all subpages, but didn't even read the hrefs from the main page:

  • Google has crawled my main page three times in the past couple weeks. It also crawled some resources (images and JS files).
  • Google Search Console does not list any internal links (or external ones, for I have not published the site's URL yet to anyone except you helpful helpers).
  • When I enter a subpage URL (like https://example.com/en/print) directly into Google Search Console, it tells me that "Page is not indexed: URL is unknown to Google". I would assume that a URL is only unknown to Google if it hasn't found the URL in any link whatsoever.

Question: What could I be doing wrong (apart from not having a sitemap yet)?

John Conde
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144226734
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  • How old is the site? You say "in the past couple weeks" which makes me suspect that it just hasn't been around very long. – Stephen Ostermiller Aug 25 '22 at 16:05
  • @stephen It was first uploaded ca. 5 weeks ago. I immediately asked Google to crawl via Search Console, which was then done on July 27th. Google revisited/recrawled the site since then three or four times, but it just keeps recrawling the same URLs (main page, and some resources). I would think, that once Google crawls a page even once, it should at least now know the subpages' URLs, even though they themselves would be indexed way later. Isn't that correct? – 144226734 Aug 25 '22 at 16:15
  • Yes, it should crawl all the linked pages. I assume you are looking in your server's log files to know what Googlebot is accessing? – Stephen Ostermiller Aug 25 '22 at 16:17
  • I like your site, BTW. I have my own sudoku software and site (qqwing). Your solver rates puzzles with more granularity than mine and looks like it tests for a couple techniques that mine does not. – Stephen Ostermiller Aug 25 '22 at 16:19
  • @StephenOstermiller Thank you =) I have checked the logs but nothing particularly alarming. Some calls from several crawlers, but errors are seemingly only from blackhats trying weird URLs. All other calls that I guess was Google, are the same ones listed inside Google Search Console. (Main page + some JS + some images) – 144226734 Aug 25 '22 at 16:23
  • I got the impression that if in the first pass for that link it didn't like the page, it would never crawl it again. Have you tried telling Google to reindex it ? – Rohit Gupta Aug 26 '22 at 00:46
  • I would get links from other sites. For example you could put the link in your network profile across StackExchange. Googlebot should find that and consider the page more interesting ... post on twitter, youtube, (googlebot likes those), facebook, (bing likes facebook) ... etc, and et la. Google is about to do another major update ... May bring in a lot of new fresh content ... The update is called helpful content and may cause a lot of people to react. It may clean out a lot of old information that google deems as more of less the same as 1000 other sites. – Wayne Smith Aug 26 '22 at 01:50
  • @RohitGupta Google likes what others like. Before being able to submit one's site to google we had to wait for google for find a signal that it liked the page. IE a link from another site or sometimes a few. At present Google does not seem to be picking up much new stuff ... if history repeats it will do a purge to make room. – Wayne Smith Aug 26 '22 at 02:21
  • @RohitGupta But it did crawl it again, but ignoring all of its links. I can manually request it again. It doesn't help me understand that blackbox that is the google bot, though. But I guess nobody really knows what it does exactly. :/ – 144226734 Aug 26 '22 at 09:23
  • Thanks for all of your inputs. – 144226734 Aug 26 '22 at 09:23

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