How to approach the work
Export the Page indexing report and group the affected URLs by template. Choose one important service page, one article and one category as samples. Inspect their live response, indexability and Google-selected canonical. A successful live test shows accessibility at that moment; it does not promise inclusion in search.
What to check and change
For URLs Google has not discovered, add contextual links from relevant indexed pages and include the canonical URL in the sitemap. For crawled but unindexed pages, compare their useful content with pages already serving the same intent. Merge repetitive pages when they offer no independent value. For server failures, fix availability before requesting another crawl.
A practical example
Example: a dental-service page and six city copies all answer the same questions. Adding all seven to a sitemap does not solve their overlap. Keep genuinely different service-area information where it exists and consolidate the rest into a stronger page.
What to measure and ask your agency
Track the submitted canonical URL, exclusion reason, last crawl, impressions and qualified enquiries. Reinspect a small sample after deployment. An SEO agency should explain which exclusion is intentional, which requires a technical fix and which reflects a content decision.
Continue reading
Technical reference: Google Search Central
Work with an SEO agency
Send your website, target market and the business outcome you want. We will discuss the technical and content priorities, who will implement the work and how the outcome will be measured.
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