Google won't index a Pages article, says "No referring sitemaps detected"

[David N.]

I just published an article, and clicked "REQUEST INDEXING" yet Google still won't index it? 

[opentype]

What’s the question? You can’t force Google to index it. It’s best to spread pages that are important to you on the internet and that will be a signal for search engines to treat is as more important. Having the majority of community pages not indexed is actually normal these days. 

And if you have a sitemap registered with Google, just let it do its thing. You don’t have to ask for individual pages to be indexed. That’s what that “no sitemap detected” is telling you. 

[Daniel F]

The sitemap is built with a background task that runs all 15 minutes. This means that once you publish it, it won't be immediately listed in the sitemap, but it will appear once the sitemap is rebuilt successfully!

[David N.]

Update: Google has finally indexed the page.

5 hours ago, opentype said:

What’s the question?

How come the page isn't automatically indexed quicker and without manual intervention, the way my community pages are. 

5 hours ago, opentype said:

You can’t force Google to index it.

I know that, however I also know that I can reasonably expect Google to index it. 

5 hours ago, opentype said:

You don’t have to ask for individual pages to be indexed. That’s what that “no sitemap detected” is telling you. 

Nearly 100% of my new community pages are indexed within a couple of hours, without manual intervention. 

Without manual intervention, my Pages blog articles (Article database) are not indexed, even after a week. With my manual intervention (requesting indexing), they take about a day to be indexed. 

5 hours ago, Daniel F said:

The sitemap is built with a background task that runs all 15 minutes. This means that once you publish it, it won't be immediately listed in the sitemap, but it will appear once the sitemap is rebuilt successfully!

Thanks Daniel. That screenshot I took was about 24 hours after I had published the article, so I'm not sure why I got that message. 

Again, this happens only with Articles from Pages. Forum topics are indexed without manual intervention in under 3 hours. 

Edited September 29, 2023 by David N.

[Randy Calvert]

11 hours ago, David N. said:

How come the page isn't automatically indexed quicker and without manual intervention, the way my community pages are. 

As noted above by Daniel… saving a page does not instantly generate a change to the sitemap. It’s done as a background task.  It’s literally the same task that updates for the forum threads. 

You don’t need to manually submit it to Google. They’ll crawl your site every so often looking for changes. It will never be instantly but the frequency is determined by Google based on the frequency of content updates, popularity of content, and a bunch of other things that is decided by Google. 

[Marc Stridgen]

To clarify here, if its not showing on google test as you are showing there, this isnt something over which we have control. What we do have control over is what is in your sitemap. So if you have items you believe are not being added to your sitemap, we can of course take a look at that for you, but we would need specific examples

[Dll]

On 9/29/2023 at 2:26 PM, David N. said:

Again, this happens only with Articles from Pages. Forum topics are indexed without manual intervention in under 3 hours. 

Google will prioritise which parts of a site to crawl more frequently. I'd assume your forum is more active than your pages articles, so it's crawling for fresh content on a regular basis. 

[David N.]

Thank you Marc. My articles are now indexed and they are listed in the sitemap as expected. 

1 minute ago, Dll said:

Google will prioritise which parts of a site to crawl more frequently. I'd assume your forum is more active than your pages articles, so it's crawling for fresh content on a regular basis. 

Ok that makes sense, thanks! I'll continue to request indexing manually then. 

On 9/30/2023 at 3:22 AM, Randy Calvert said:

You don’t need to manually submit it to Google.

I'm not sure what you mean by "need": my experience is that if I request indexing in Google Search Console, my article is indexed within a few hours, whereas if I don't, the page is still not indexed after a week. 

[Dll]

2 minutes ago, David N. said:

Ok that makes sense, thanks! I'll continue to request indexing manually then. 

On 9/30/2023 at 2:22 AM, Randy Calvert said:

Make sure you link to it from your forum pages as well; that ought to encourage google to crawl it. 

[opentype]

3 minutes ago, David N. said:

Ok that makes sense, thanks! I'll continue to request indexing manually then. 

That doesn’t follow from anything anyone has said here. 

[David N.]

47 minutes ago, opentype said:

That doesn’t follow from anything anyone has said here. 

It's just my own personal experience: if I don't, the article is still not indexed after 1 week. If I do, the article is indexed within a few hours. 

49 minutes ago, Dll said:

Make sure you link to it from your forum pages as well; that ought to encourage google to crawl it. 

Yes, when I publish a new article, I also manually create a new topic in a forum to announce the article and link to it. That new topic is indexed automatically within under 3 hours.