Website doesn't seem to be indexed by Google Search Engine

Running Zen Cart 1.5.7c on PHP 7.4 with Responsive Template.

I have a recent website (over 4 months now) that seems to be taking a bit of time to get on Google search engine... the Homepage was indexed a while ago now and so far only 2 other pages have been indexed, sometimes 3 but then it disappears and only 3 show as per the snapshot below.

I have a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml and the website scores pretty good on Lighthouse as well.
NO errors show on my google search console.
I also have Google AdWords set up to help drive traffic to the site which in turn helps Googlebot to index the site quicker.

Not sure what else I can do to get more of my pages indexed?!
(It could be a coincidence, but I have spotted Googlebot on my home page only, and I never notice it on any other page! I even have StatCounter which shows me that the Googlebot seems to only crawl my main page!)
Can someone PLEASE have a look to ensure there is nothing on my site that is causing most of my pages not to be indexed?

https://i.imgur.com/83az7Uz.png (You can view the website via the image)

Nothing really stands out, for me. I took the liberty of crawling your site to check for broken links and the only one I found was the breadcrumb's 'Home' link (ending in a double slash). I doubt it's that significant so more of an FYI. The fix for it is:

https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?227863-Double-slash-in-breadcrumb-home-link-v1-5-7c

simon1066:

Nothing really stands out, for me. I took the liberty of crawling your site to check for broken links and the only one I found was the breadcrumb's 'Home' link (ending in a double slash). I doubt it's that significant so more of an FYI. The fix for it is:

https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?227863-Double-slash-in-breadcrumb-home-link-v1-5-7c

Thanks Simon, I did notice that // but forgot to look into it further as I was doing many things at once! Thanks for the fix :)
I can’t seem to see why either, just now I see Googlebot on the who’s online and it just stays on homepage / and goes inactive reasonably quickly ?!

You might want to work through Google's guidelines (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/webmaster-guidelines), one of their suggestions is Structured Data and there is a plugin for that.

... and I assume you have setup your site in Google's Search Console.

... and built a sitemap.

https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=367

Also, one a little newer. READ the install.instructions.txt!

https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2290

swguy:

... and built a sitemap.
https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=367

dbltoe:

Also, one a little newer. READ the install.instructions.txt!
https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2290

Thanks guys, but I already have a sitemap.xml which is being successfully fetched via the Google search console.

rlexyd:

Thanks guys, but I already have a sitemap.xml which is being successfully fetched via the Google search console.
When I look at the "newly generated" sitemap.xml file that has not been made with either of the plugins described above, I see two links in that file that to me based on information others have been provided would be problematic:

Note, these two links describe the same thing, but... They are that, two links to the same product but nothing is provided in the file to say: hey, here are two ways to get to this, but only really pay attention to this one... (note that is done through the use of the canonical link, but when using the ZC google sitemaps XML file, a product is listed one and only one time in the product's file.)

I agree with you mc, but when I generated the xml from the (SitemapXML v.2.1 plugin), Google wasn't fetching them correctly and had to resort to generating my sitemap using the (xml-sitemaps.com) which google recommended, then it finally fetched my .xml file correctly. Don't ask me why google had trouble fetching them considering they where able to be viewed correctly when clicking on the links themselves via my browser!
We discussed this at the SitemapXML v.2.1 thread.
I should have had way more pages indexed/crawled by now, I had the sitemapxml v2.1 plugin installed ages ago, so obviously google had an issue with it somehow?!

You have a phantom category you absolutely have to eliminate it, maybe you have a penalty because of that. And H1 and H2 heading are missing everywhere.

!!!!

rlexyd:

I agree with you mc, but when I generated the xml from the (SitemapXML v.2.1 plugin), Google wasn't fetching them correctly and had to resort to generating my sitemap using the (xml-sitemaps.com) which google recommended, then it finally fetched my .xml file correctly. Don't ask me why google had trouble fetching them considering they where able to be viewed correctly when clicking on the links themselves via my browser!
We discussed this at the SitemapXML v.2.1 thread.
I should have had way more pages indexed/crawled by now, I had the sitemapxml v2.1 plugin installed ages ago, so obviously google had an issue with it somehow?!
You might want to try https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2290. SitemapXML4 is a little newer and may produce a better sitemap file.

As to the blank category, it is not a good accessibility practice but, it should not have much effect on rank. If the blank space resulted from bad code, the search engines would react. The SEs are probably busy enough without having to evaluate WCAG at the same time.

More concering in the Accessibilty is the empty buttons that appear to be display:none under the copyright on profuct pages.```
<div id="cboxOverlay" style="display: none;"></div>

Point to remember.  display:none does not prevent SEs and WebAIM from seeing them in the code.

Thanks Diamond1, appreciate your response.
I have removed the blank category, it was only there from a visual perspective as I wanted to add a blank Space/padding between the last category and the New products.. and this was the simplest way to achieve this. But considering this might not be viewed too well with SE, I have removed it and will figure out another method to achieve this.

Thank you dbltoe for your suggestion re: the empty button errors generating from colorbox..
Not sure how to remove that code, I searched for it using the developers tool kit and it didn't find it?
I might ask that question on the colorbox support thread.

As for the Sitemap, I think I will try the SitemapXML4 as the one I'm using is still giving me problems, with some of the files generated by that plugin still saying (Couldn't be Fetched) by Google Search Console.