If you see a message that your site is not indexed, it may be because it is indexed under a different domain. For example, if you receive a message that http://example.com
is not indexed, make sure that you've also added http://www.example.com
to your account (or vice versa), and check the data for that site.
Why?
Not all websites have URLs in the form www.example.com
. Your root URL may not include the www
subdomain (example.com
); it may include a custom subdomain (rollergirl.example.com
); or your site may live in a subfolder, for example if it's hosted on a free hosting site (www.example.com/rollergirl/
).
Most people don't think of www
as a subdomain. It's a very, very common subdomain, and many sites serve the same content whether you access them with or without the www. But to Google, example.com
and www.example.com
are two different URLs with the potential to serve different content. For this reason, they're considered different sites in Search Console. When you're looking at the data for www.example.com
you're not seeing the data for example.com
(without the www
subdomain), and vice versa.
Since we want site owners to be able to access our tools regardless of how their site is hosted, you can add any combination of domain, subdomain(s), and/or subfolder(s) as a "site" in Search Console. We'll show you the information we have for that particular piece of the web, however big or small it may be. If you've verified your domain at the root level, we'll show you data for that whole domain; if you've only verified a particular subfolder or subdomain, we'll only show you data for that subfolder or subdomain. For example, someone who blogs with Blogger has access to the data for their own subdomain (example.blogspot.com
), but not the entire blogspot.com
domain.