Page indexed without content

Google’s help page says the page appears in the index, but for some reason Google could not read the content. It names two possible reasons: the page might be cloaked to Google, or in a format Google cannot index. And it rules one out: this is not a case of robots.txt blocking, which has its own status, Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt.

• Something serves Google a different page. Cloaking is often not deliberate: bot protection that answers crawlers with a challenge or an empty page, a firewall rule, a CDN setting, a plugin that treats unknown visitors differently. The page looks complete in your browser and empty to Google.
• A format Google cannot read. A file type it does not index, a document that is really an image of text, or a response whose content type says one thing and whose body is another.

One more thing worth ruling out while you look: a page whose text is drawn by a script that fails for Google. The live test shows what Google got.

• Inspect the page in Search Console, as the help page asks, and read the details of how it was indexed.
• Run the live test in URL Inspection: it fetches the page in real time. Open what it got, the HTML and the screenshot. A challenge page, a login form or an empty body is your answer.
• Look at your bot protection and firewall logs for Googlebot’s requests to the address, and what they were answered with.
• Check the response itself: curl -sI and the address shows the status and the Content-Type a plain request gets.

When the cause is fixed, use Request indexing for the pages that matter. Google notes a daily limit, so start with the important ones.

No Trakis check finds this cause directly. The audit reads what an ordinary request gets, and a page cloaked to Google answers our crawler like anyone else. What it does see is the neighbouring trouble: pages it could not download at all, firewalls that refuse it, and a site where a browser gets in and a plain fetch does not. If a page is in your audit with its full text and still listed here, the difference is in what Google is answered.

The other status indexed with a warning is Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt; the rest are on every Search Console status, explained.

Is the page in Google or not? In the index, Google says, but without the content it could not read.

Is it a penalty? No. It is Google reporting what it could and could not read.

Could robots.txt be the cause? Google says no: a page blocked by robots.txt is reported under its own status.

The Trakis audit reads every page as a visitor’s request gets it, and reports the pages that fail, refuse or come back empty, each problem once with the pages it covers. Create a free account and add your site.