Looking for a reality check from people who've launched a site from scratch.
Set mine up a few months ago and did the SEO fundamentals as far as I can tell:
Here's the frustrating part: Google indexed my homepage and it shows up for my brand name no problem. But my category pages, tag pages, and content pages are all stuck on "Crawled – currently not indexed" (a few say "Discovered – not indexed"). Requested indexing manually, resubmitted the sitemap, gave it a few weeks — homepage stays, everything else just sits there.
So I'm trying to figure out:
My gut says it's low domain authority since I don't have many backlinks yet, but I'd rather hear from people who've actually pushed through it than keep second-guessing my setup. Can share the URL if that helps.
Set mine up a few months ago and did the SEO fundamentals as far as I can tell:
- Unique titles and descriptions on every page, no duplication
- Sitemap submitted and validating clean in Search Console
- Canonicals set correctly, nothing accidentally noindexed, robots.txt open
- Categories and pages internally linked to each other
- Loads fast, passes mobile / Core Web Vitals
Here's the frustrating part: Google indexed my homepage and it shows up for my brand name no problem. But my category pages, tag pages, and content pages are all stuck on "Crawled – currently not indexed" (a few say "Discovered – not indexed"). Requested indexing manually, resubmitted the sitemap, gave it a few weeks — homepage stays, everything else just sits there.
So I'm trying to figure out:
- On a brand-new domain, is "only homepage indexed" just the normal starting point, or a sign something's actually broken?
- For anyone who's climbed out of this — what was the thing that finally got your inner pages indexed? Backlinks? Age? Restructuring internal links?
- Did earning even a few solid referring domains change how aggressively Google indexed the rest of the site?
My gut says it's low domain authority since I don't have many backlinks yet, but I'd rather hear from people who've actually pushed through it than keep second-guessing my setup. Can share the URL if that helps.