Not on Veridian? You can still spot indexing gaps, speed issues, and quick wins using Google Search Console—no rebuild or developer required. Here’s the checklist we recommend.
For many custodians of digital archives, understanding how collections perform online can feel complex. The good news is that with Google Search Console, you can get valuable insights into user growth, engagement, and collection health—even if you’re not yet using a dedicated platform like Veridian.
About Google Search Console
Google Search Console gives custodians of digital collections essential insights into how Google discovers, crawls, and indexes pages within their archive. It also provides feedback on how Google assesses the user experience for those visiting the site, including performance on mobile devices and page load speed. For clients who host their collections on the Veridian platform, our team regularly conducts the checks below.
Checking the indexing of collection pages
A digital archive is only valuable if people can find and use it. Ensuring that all relevant pages are indexed by Google is critical. If articles, titles, or other pages are not indexed, they won’t appear in search results—limiting discoverability and reducing valuable traffic and new users.
Search Console allows you to monitor the indexing status and overall health of your collection, helping you identify and fix issues that could be holding it back.
Where to find it in Search Console: Within the main left-hand menu select Indexing > Pages.
The chart that follows provides an overview of which pages have—and have not—been indexed by Google, along with the reasons why. Keep in mind that it's common for certain pages to be intentionally blocked from crawling and indexing for valid, strategic reasons — often related to privacy, content ownership, or copyright.
It’s also important to note that it’s completely normal for Google not to index every page of a large collection. Even authoritative domains don’t always have all their pages indexed. Therefore, a collection with five million pages is unlikely to see all of them indexed. Google prioritizes what it crawls and indexes based on factors such as perceived quality, site authority, and user demand, but the exact reasons are not always transparent. However, there are things you can do to help the indexing process…
Google Search Console indexing tips:
- Submit a sitemap—a list of your collection’s pages and URLs you’d like Google to crawl and index. This is particularly important for large collections with complex site hierarchies (such as those organized by title, date, or issue). Veridian automatically generates and submits sitemaps on behalf of our customers, so they don’t need to manage this step themselves.
- Look for any of the following alerts:
- Crawled - currently not indexed
- Discovered - currently not indexed
- Any errors (404s, server issues)
Related case studies:
Checking collection vitals
Digital newspaper and historical archive collections often have to accommodate image-heavy pages, scanned documents, and embedded viewers—all of which can impact page speed and layout stability, especially on mobile devices. Poor performance here can drive users away before they engage with your content.
This is where a specialized platform—like Veridian—can help. Veridian is designed to present digitized content in a way that’s both user-friendly and performance-optimized, with features that handle large-scale archives efficiently across all devices.
Google Search Console helps you monitor these performance factors and pinpoint where improvements are needed.
Where to find it in Search Console: Within the main left hand menu select Experience > Core Web Vitals.
Opening the report that follows will provide a health assessment of your collection’s pages and lets you drill down into why certain pages may be underperforming.
Google Search Console tips:
Useful metrics to look at and monitor:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading speed.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures responsiveness.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability.
- Mobile usability issues: Text too small, clickable elements too close together, etc.
Prefer not to wrangle sitemaps, indexing checks, and Core Web Vitals every week? Veridian pairs a purpose-built platform with a managed team that handles it for you—continuous monitoring, alerts, and clear reports—so you can focus on growing your collection, not the maintenance. Contact us today to find out more.