About 3 weeks ago I wrote and published a couple of articles for my client’s website. The articles are completely relevant to his site and category.
I created a Google Search Console account, and set everything up the best I know.
It says his site was crawled, but when I type in “Some Great Article Title You Must Read” it is not indexed.
WTF?
Might I add that after a month his site comes up between page 10-15 when I search his main category (e.g. Volvo Mechanics in Seattle, WA)
You can limit the search to a particular site if you want to be absolutely sure whether it’s been indexed or not:
site:mysite.com "Some Great Article Title You Must Read"
Nada!
I guess the next thing to check would be how well the article is linked from within the site. for example, is there a link to it from the home page?
Other than that, perhaps complain to Google that their service is not up to scratch and you want your money back. 
Yes, I have a link from the Home Page.
It is a tiny site, so I don’t have any other links to it.
Google only taketh… 
So how do I get my articles indexed?
I gather that Google’s crawlers may not come around all that often at first, but speed up as the site becomes more established. Perhaps another way to speed up the process would be to have other links, such as from social media like Twitter, Facebook, Google+. If you have a GMail account, set up a Google+ page to promote/discuss the site, with links to articles. Also email the link to friends, as I suspect that GMail links get picked up by Google too (just a suspicion). Do the same with Facebook.
You seem to have multiple threads on pretty much the same topic, and I’ve already posted this in one of the others, but I’ll post it again here:
[quote=Google]Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all pages
of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.[/quote]
And if that isn’t clear enough, they also say:
[quote=Google] Google doesn’t crawl all the pages on the web, and we don’t index all
the pages we crawl. It’s perfectly normal for not all the pages on a
site to be indexed.[/quote]
So the bottom line is, you can only do so much. Beyond that, it’s entirely up to Google and you have no final control over it.
I found those answers on my own yesterday.
So I am looking for a way to get over that hurdle.
Would a bunch of backlinks make Google get off its ass?
Would a bunch of distinct traffic help?
Would more internal links pointing to said non-indexed articles/pages help?
OK, now you’ve lost me. Which hurdle? You’ve read quotes from Google stating quite plainly that they do not guarantee to index every page, and you’re still asking for a magic solution to make them do it for your site? Or have I misunderstood your question?
You’ve been given advice on how to optimise your chances of getting the pages indexed. You can do your best with that and the rest is up to Google.
Out of interest, does Bing (or any other search engine) show the article pages?
Right, and it seems to me that I have failed “optimizing” things… (I bet all of your websites’ pages are indexed.)
How do I check Bing and Yahoo to see if the article was indexed - other than searching on the name?
When I put the one article title in double quotes it comes up in Yahoo and Bing, but only listed as the Home Page. I guess this is because the article in question is also on the Home Page.
Strange it gets sorta indexed there but not the actual page…
I believe your site is a local garage, if so have you considered registering for a Free Google Local Business Account?
Yes, a local garage.
What is that and how would it help this situation?
I do know the owner has been listed in the online White Pages for several directories for years, so as far as that goes he is established.
But I’m not sure how any of that would get one of the articles I wrote indexed.
According to their blurb:
Be there when customers look for you online
Playing hard to get: good for dating, bad for business. Use Google My Business to put the right info about your business on Search, Maps and Google+ so that customers can get in touch.
Show up on the web
Your next customer could be a click away. When you get on Google, you make it easier for customers to find information about your business online, including hours, contact information and directions.
Views
Discover how many times customers find your business on Google, and trends over time.
Thanks for the tip. Not sure it will help at this point since I think I am losing this client’s interest. (Which is why I am trying to beat Google into line so I can try and save things.)
So frustrating…
Don’t try to “beat” it. Work with it.
Google Business is Google
Is it possible to see the site?
If not it is a guessing game, could be that one of your meta tags is set to nofollow, no index, etc
It is possible, but I am too ashamed right now - even though I know you are trying to help.
Well, here is the HTML part of my article template script…
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<!-- HTML Metadata -->
<title><?php echo (isset($htmlTitle) ? $htmlTitle . ' -- ' . COMPANY_NAME : 'Article -- ' . COMPANY_NAME); ?></title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $htmlDescription; ?>" />
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $htmlKeywords; ?>" />
</head>