Google has indexed some of our old posts. What took so long and will we lose rank for their brevity?

[francoisdelame]

Hi,

We just had a few of our old blog posts indexed by Google. There are short formed posts, and I want to make sure we're not going to get dinged by Google for their length. Can you advise?https://www.policygenius.com/blog/guaranteed-issue

[evolvingSEO]

No problem. Screaming Frog (or any crawler) won't pick it up, because it's not being linked to within the website (it's an "orphaned" page).

Google could still index them because they are in the sitemap, but it took so long because they are no actually linked to from the website.

So... if it's not supposed to be indexed at all in the first place, you can add a meta "noindex" tag to the page and remove it from the sitemap. Then you'll be all set

[francoisdelame]

Thanks, Dan!

Is there a reason why Screaming Frog wouldn't pick up, even though it was on the sitemap to be crawled?

Google has actually indexed two pages for these pages here (trailing slash and non-trailing slash). We've got our 301 redirects and canonical tags setup correctly though.

To add another layer to this puzzle looks like this URL shouldn't be indexed at all, as it is instead of the home of content referenced in other places, like here: https://www.policygenius.com/blog/glossary/life-insurance.

Appreciate the help!

Looks like this URL shouldn't be indexed at all, as it is instead of the home of content referenced in other places, like here: https://www.policygenius.com/blog/glossary/life-insurance.

[evolvingSEO]

It was probably indexed so late because Google couldn't find it

I just crawled the whole site with Screaming Frog and that URL wasn't picked up in the crawl --> http://screencast.com/t/xzunkNR3K

But it's in your sitemap --> https://www.policygenius.com/blog/post-sitemap.xml - so this makes total sense why it took Google so long to find it

[LoganRay]

It depends on how accessible they are to search engines. If you've recently updated your sitemap, and those posts are on the new one, but weren't on the old one, that could cause it. New internal/external links pointing to those pages could have helped as well.

[francoisdelame]

Thanks for the responses! Is there a reason why some of these pages were indexed so late (we published them several months ago)? We've had some newer posts index quicker than this one. I know there's not an exact reason, but trying to get some insights.

Thanks!

[GastonRiera]

Hi Francois,

As Logan said, the problem comes when the whole site has short content issue.

I might ask, if that post is ranking well, why dont you edit it and creat some valuable content? Google loves when re-editing and improving your content.

Hope it helps.
GR.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

As long as that's not the bulk of your content, I don't see it being a problem. Thin content penalties are more common when short-form content is the majority of a site. I've mostly seen this with ecommerce sites where product detail pages make up about 95% of the page count and the product descriptions are thin or non-existent. It's hard to be viewed as authoritative or trustworthy when only 5% of your pages have a decent amount of content.