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Your site needs to be up and running if you want to be found in search engines. If you aren’t blocking anything — deliberately or accidentally — search engine spiders can crawl and index it. You probably know that Yoast SEO has lots of options to determine what does and doesn’t need to be indexed, but did you know it also has a tool that monitors your site’s indexability? This is the indexability check, provided by our good friends at Ryte.
Update: In Yoast 13.2, we moved the Ryte indexability check from the Yoast meta box on your Dashboard. You can now find the Ryte indexability check in the WordPress Site Health tool! In WordPress 5.4 the site health status widget also appears on the Dashboard.
The indexability check checks if your site is indexable and does so on a weekly basis. You can find the Ryte indexability check in the Site Health tool in WordPress. The Site Health tool groups its checks into three sections:
critical issues
recommended improvements
and passed tests.
The Ryte check will be displayed within one of these groups. When your site can be found by search engines, the Ryte check appears in the Passed tests section of the Site Health tool. If something is wrong and it needs your attention, the Ryte check appears with an SEO tag next to the issue.
The Ryte check in the WordPress Site Health tool
When you see a Ryte check warning among the critical issues, it means that your site cannot be found by search engines. You need to act on this issue quickly if you want your content to appear in the search engines.
In some cases, an error occurs while checking whether your site can be found by search engines. Or Ryte might not be able to determine if your site is findable. When this happens, we recommend you check what is causing those issues.
What do I have to do to get it?
We add this check automatically when you install Yoast SEO. You can find it by going to the WordPress admin menu item Tools > Site Health. In WordPress 5.4 you can also find a Site Health Status widget on the Dashboard.
We advise you to keep the Ryte check turned on. But we do give you the option to turn it off. Learn how to do this by following the steps in this post.
Error: your site cannot be found by search engines
Your homepage cannot be indexed by search engines. This is very bad for SEO and should be fixed.
Are you getting the error message shown above? When Yoast SEO reports your site as not indexable by search engines, this can be caused by several reasons. However, it is an issue of the highest priority, assuming that you want your site to be indexed by Google.
First of all, test your URL in Google’s mobile-friendly test here. If Google can run the mobile-friendly test for your domain, Google can also crawl the domain. In that case, the Ryte warning is wrong.
If Google cannot run the mobile-friendly test, our advice is to follow this Go to Ryte to analyze your entire site link, create an account on Ryte (formerly OnPage.org) and see what they have to tell you. One possibility is that you have a robots.txt file that’s blocking indexing. Or perhaps your theme has some code in it that’s blocking search engines. Ryte can tell you what the problem is and how to fix it!
Indexability check fails
If your indexability check fails, your server is not able to connect to the ryte.com servers to retrieve the indexability status for your domain. This can happen for several reasons:
Your server can’t connect to other servers at all.
Your server has a whitelist of servers it’s allowed to connect to. In this case, adding ryte.com would fix that.
A myriad of other server configuration reasons.
Usually, your hosting party can tell you the cause of the issues and will also be able to help you fix it. If not, go to Ryte where you can create a free account and have access to all of the benefits without having to change anything on your server.
The Yoast Ryte check
Ryte & Yoast SEO
You can now find the Ryte indexability check in the WordPress Site Health tool! This way, you can quickly see whether your site is still reachable for search engines and visitors. If you need help fixing technical SEO issues or if you are in need of a suite of SEO tools to help you fix or improve your rankings, sign up for the free Ryte introductory plan. Just go to Ryte and follow the instructions!
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28 Responses to Yoast SEO & Ryte: Checking your site’s indexability
Cheryl • 2 years ago
Isn’t this just another way to sell a paid product? Are you saying that If I don’t sign up for this that Google will not not be able to find my website in searches? I am new to blogging and not making any money yet and very leery about just giving out my money for unnecessary products.
Hi I am having a big indexing problem and I don’t know how to fix it, is there any way someone could help me or point me in the right direction? I am having a (?/!) error and Robots.txt file error…thanks! Nora
I am experiencing the following error in site health Yoast SEO:
Error details: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 5000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received (http_request_failed)
I appreciate it if you explain.
Fakhruddin Ahmad • 2 years ago
I am also facing the same problem
Heidi Trimas • 2 years ago
Same problem here…
Brian Oakes • 2 years ago
same, i am having the same exact issue since updating my Yoast Premium, please let me know if you figure it out.
Flynn Sorell • 2 years ago
Much obliged to you, I had some genuine indexation issues and this helped me out a great deal!
camillecunningham • 2 years ago
You’re welcome Flynn! Lots of luck with your site :)
Smith R. • 2 years ago
Can I turn off “Ryte integration”? Will it affect anything?
^ Post author
Edwin Toonen • 2 years ago
Hi. You can turn off the feature by going to the General tab and clicking on Features, here’ll find an overview of all the Yoast SEO features. This article describes how to do it: https://yoast.com/help/disable-indexability-check/
Ramesh • 2 years ago
Do we have any video tutorials for this ?
Felix Hesse • 2 years ago
Thank you, I had some serious indexation problems and this helped me out a lot!
Willemien Hallebeek • 2 years ago
Glad to help, Felix!
Jason • 2 years ago
Would this have something to do with a CRON task that is being reported as having no action attached to it?
I notice that the ‘onpage’ folder within the ‘admin’ folder is no longer there.
This is where the CRON task “wpseo_onpage_fetch” originally was found.
Is this simply a leftover cron task that I can delete? It tries to run once weekly but cannot.
Christina • 2 years ago
Hello! I am so glad I came across this very educative post. For some time now my website has been having issues. After reading this post, I am very confident things will change. I will love to have updates on recent post on your blog. Thank you
camillecunningham • 2 years ago
Hi Christina, you’re very welcome! If you want to receive updates, you could subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
Acuk • 2 years ago
hi yoast SEO i went to Rye to check my site, but i find my site isnt connecting to my yoast seo, can you give me a tips how to connect my site ?
camillecunningham • 2 years ago
Hi Acuk, sorry to hear that! I recommend having a look at our support page to find a solution to your issue: https://yoast.com/help/support/
Good luck :-)
Z Harriet YODER • 2 years ago
Ryte can’t index my site. I think it is Cloudflare. Do I need to whitelist the Ryte IP addresses?
Dijana Muzhdeka • 2 years ago
Hi Harriet, sorry to hear that. Your hosting company may have the best solution to your issue. So, we advise you to contact them and ask for their assistance.
Good luck!
Z Harriet YODER • 2 years ago
Oh, and Google and Bing have indexed it.
Cybnetics • 2 years ago
Awesome post , you made it really easy to understand this pretty hard topic for beginners. You helped me a lot so I just wanna say thank you.
camillecunningham • 2 years ago
Thank you, we’re glad to hear it :-) Good luck and stay safe!
chuajane123 • 2 years ago
hi yoast SEO i went to Rye to check and made 2 attempt to run and check my site from google but i think my search engine no where to be found . its written 400 That’s an error. It says, The requested URL was not found in the server.
Yiran Liu • 2 years ago
It seems that Ryte is very useful and helpful for beginners to check the indexability, but the price is not very cheap for newbies….
See more from the Become a Yoast SEO pro series 
Isn’t this just another way to sell a paid product? Are you saying that If I don’t sign up for this that Google will not not be able to find my website in searches? I am new to blogging and not making any money yet and very leery about just giving out my money for unnecessary products.
Hi Cheryl!
Don’t worry, as long as your site’s technical side is in order, Google will still be able to index your website. This tool actually checks whether that’s the case. If you want to try it out for free, you can here: https://en.ryte.com/lp/yoast/?op_campaign=638516a5c963f978&utm_campaign=free&utm_medium=link&utm_source=yoast&offer_id=2&aff_id=872
Hi I am having a big indexing problem and I don’t know how to fix it, is there any way someone could help me or point me in the right direction? I am having a (?/!) error and Robots.txt file error…thanks! Nora
Hi Nora! I’m sorry to hear that! Maybe our ultimate guide to robots.txt has some answers for you? https://yoast.com/ultimate-guide-robots-txt/
I am experiencing the following error in site health Yoast SEO:
Error details: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 5000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received (http_request_failed)
I appreciate it if you explain.
I am also facing the same problem
Same problem here…
same, i am having the same exact issue since updating my Yoast Premium, please let me know if you figure it out.
Much obliged to you, I had some genuine indexation issues and this helped me out a great deal!
You’re welcome Flynn! Lots of luck with your site :)
Can I turn off “Ryte integration”? Will it affect anything?
Hi. You can turn off the feature by going to the General tab and clicking on Features, here’ll find an overview of all the Yoast SEO features. This article describes how to do it: https://yoast.com/help/disable-indexability-check/
Do we have any video tutorials for this ?
Thank you, I had some serious indexation problems and this helped me out a lot!
Glad to help, Felix!
Would this have something to do with a CRON task that is being reported as having no action attached to it?
I notice that the ‘onpage’ folder within the ‘admin’ folder is no longer there.
This is where the CRON task “wpseo_onpage_fetch” originally was found.
Is this simply a leftover cron task that I can delete? It tries to run once weekly but cannot.
Hello! I am so glad I came across this very educative post. For some time now my website has been having issues. After reading this post, I am very confident things will change. I will love to have updates on recent post on your blog. Thank you
Hi Christina, you’re very welcome! If you want to receive updates, you could subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
hi yoast SEO i went to Rye to check my site, but i find my site isnt connecting to my yoast seo, can you give me a tips how to connect my site ?
Hi Acuk, sorry to hear that! I recommend having a look at our support page to find a solution to your issue: https://yoast.com/help/support/
Good luck :-)
Ryte can’t index my site. I think it is Cloudflare. Do I need to whitelist the Ryte IP addresses?
Hi Harriet, sorry to hear that. Your hosting company may have the best solution to your issue. So, we advise you to contact them and ask for their assistance.
Good luck!
Oh, and Google and Bing have indexed it.
Awesome post , you made it really easy to understand this pretty hard topic for beginners. You helped me a lot so I just wanna say thank you.
Thank you, we’re glad to hear it :-) Good luck and stay safe!
hi yoast SEO i went to Rye to check and made 2 attempt to run and check my site from google but i think my search engine no where to be found . its written 400 That’s an error. It says, The requested URL was not found in the server.
It seems that Ryte is very useful and helpful for beginners to check the indexability, but the price is not very cheap for newbies….
Hi Yiran, did you know that you can try it here for free? https://en.ryte.com/lp/yoast/?op_campaign=638516a5c963f978&utm_campaign=free&utm_medium=link&utm_source=yoast&offer_id=2&aff_id=872
Good luck!