This article discusses short steps to get an OJS-based journal indexed by Google and Google Scholar. I wrote this article as a contribution to answer the question of OJS users, "why isn't my journal indexed by Google Scholar?" I start this article by discussing some of the possible causes of a journal not being indexed by search engines and then I provide some workable solutions. Hopefully this article is useful for all OJS and OJStat users.
Possible factors why a journal is not indexed by search engines, especially Google
We need to know that both Google and Google Scholar are search engines. Some other popular search engines are Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex. The way these search engines work is more or less the same, namely crawling all websites on the internet, assessing the website, and deciding whether the website can be indexed or not. What we have to underline is that search engines do some sort of assessment on a website, including journals.
What does a search engine evaluate or check for a journal?
1. Low-Value Content
Every search engine has an algorithm that works to maintain its reputation. The point I want to make is that Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Yandex are companies that don't want to be underrated. Therefore, their search engine is set to only index websites that have valuable content.
Content that is valuable in the eyes of search engines is content that contains trending keywords. Trending keywords are keywords that search engine users enter when searching for information on the internet. The more that keyword is searched for, the higher its value. Therefore, content that contains the most searched keywords is the most valuable content in the eyes of search engines.
One of the indexation problems experienced by a journal is the lack of valuable content. Included in this issue are journals that have recently published several articles (a new journal). Another possibility is, even if a journal has published many articles, most articles contain content that is too shallow and many similar articles (containing the same keywords) have been indexed by the search engine.
Publishing plagiarized articles also has the potential to be ignored by search engines. Search engines are equipped with special algorithms to check whether the content of a page has a certain percentage in common with other pages that have been indexed by it. For this reason, journal publishers must pay attention to the quality of the articles published in their journals.
2. Unregistered Journal
Each search engine has a special page where we can register our journals to be prioritized by it. The page is called the Webmaster or Search Console. Through this page, we can register our journals, submit journal sitemaps, check URLs in our journals (whether they can be indexed or not), and suggest search engines to index journal articles as soon as possible.
Without having a Webmaster account on a search engine, the journal indexing process is still running but takes longer. In addition, by having a Webmaster account, we can track which articles have and have not been indexed by a search engine.
3. Unexpected Configuration
Search engines respect the privacy of a web or journal. Some websites determine which pages can be indexed and which cannot be indexed. Some misconfiguration in the journal may cause the search engine to ignore the journal.
The configuration in the journal that is in charge of determining whether the journal is allowed to be indexed or not is the configuration in the meta tag and robots.txt. Meta tags are tags that are in the Custom Header box in the distribution settings section, especially the indexing section. Meanwhile, robots.txt is a text file located in the main journal folder. You may need to check the contents of your journal's meta tags and robots.txt now.
By default, OJS is configured to be indexed by search engines. However, if someone follows the wrong tutorial, he may have misconfigured his journal and added a meta tag or robots.txt which prohibits search engines from indexing the journals or articles in it.
4. Out of sync Metadata
Metadata is vital information for every article and issue published in a journal. As a journal editor, you don't need this explanation from me because working with OJS means working with Metadata. But did you know that in certain cases the metadata of an article or issue is out of sync and makes it difficult for search engines to index a journal?
The problem that most often occurs in this category is that there is no alignment between the date of publication of the article and the issue of publication. This happened in some older versions of OJS but was resolved in the latest version. If you're using an OJS version below 3.2, it's a good idea to check the metadata for issues and articles.
Some Workable Solutions
Based on the possibilities above, in the following I will present some things that we can do to overcome this indexing problem.
1. Publish only valuable content
I believe that all of us have published articles of great value. However, some people may be too busy to check the plagiarism level of the article or do an in-depth review. As a result, the articles published are articles of low value. Let's improve the selection and review process for articles submitted to our journals so that our journals are free from low value articles.
I would also like to point out that search engines do not index a full journal. The indexed is the article (URL) in the journal. If our journal URL has been indexed, it means that the indexed page is the journal's homepage. That doesn't mean all the articles it contains are indexed.
2. Register the journal to Webmasters
If you haven't already created an account with search engine webmasters, I suggest that you do so as soon as possible. Register your web journal at the webmaster and submit the sitemap URL to the search engine console so that all articles in the sitemap can be prioritized by search engines.
3. Check Journal Configuration
I suggest you to add the following meta tag to your journal's Custom Header if you don't find it there.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/>
You also need to check if your journal's main folder contains a robots.txt file. If there is, check into the file and see if the directive is disallowed. If there is, then notice whether the directive is there? If not, then replace disallow with allow.
4. Sync the Metadata
Make sure that the issue and article publication dates are in sync. Also pay attention to the author's name and affiliation as well as the title of the article to match. Even if an issue has been published, you can still make changes to the metadata without pulling the issue back.
Every article published in an issue must have the same publication date; the same for every article and the same between articles and issues.
Closing remarks
To end this article, I want you to know that if your journal article has been indexed by Google, then most likely it has been or will be indexed by Google Scholar. If you have further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to use the contact form provided.
Important Links (please adapt):
How to Submit Blog to Bing and Yandex
Custom Robots.txt for SEO (Blogger)
How to get Google Index your site