In a Google Office Hours Q & A, Google’s John Mueller answered a question about a site not getting indexed that brought to light a technical SEO fact about domains and subdomains that not everyone may be aware of and how that might cause the perception that a site is having trouble getting indexed.

The person asking the question created a website using a framework (Core MVC) and then published it under the secure HTTPS protocol.

However they shortly discovered that they were experiencing problems getting the content indexed.

Given that the known variables of the scenario was the framework used to build the site and that they used HTTPS protocol, the person asking the question mentioned those two factors in their question.

Could it be that the web application framework used is somehow interfering with the indexing?

Or is there something about the HTTPS configuration that’s getting in the way of indexing?

The question asked:

“I built a new site on Core MVC and moved it to HTTPS and I have problems with indexing the new pages.”

Google’s John Mueller took a look at the site and discovered that the MVC framework and HTTPS had nothing to do with the perceived indexing issues.

Mueller answered:

“…I took a look at your site and how it’s indexed.

It looks like your site is indexed without the www subdomain, so if you explicitly look for the www version of your site, you won’t find much.

If you look for the domain alone, such as site:domain.com, then you’ll find it indexed.”

There’s Always More Than What Is Seen

Sometimes the answer to a problem is hidden by the most obvious possible causes of the issue, which limits the ability to identify the true solution. The best path for solving an SEO problem is to never stop the search for an answer at any of the obvious issues.

John Mueller may have redefined the problem from the site is not indexed to the WWW version of the site is not indexed, so let’s check the non-WWW version.

WWW Is A Subdomain

The identification of the solution is also a reminder of an important technical fact about www and non-www versions of a website in that the WWW version is a subdomain of the non-www version.

Listen to the Google Office Hours at the 2:51 minute mark of the recording:

Why Is A Site Not Indexing?

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero