.nojekyll + Canonical Tag: My Simple Fix for Indexing Errors

Ayush HardeniyaAyush Hardeniya
3 min read

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🗓️ Date: June 27, 2025 | 🕦 Time: 11:30 AM

Two days back, I received a mail from Google Search Console saying that two of my website pages weren’t being indexed. The report showed that both pages were stopped from being crawled due to an error.

📸 [Search Console error message]

🔍 Investigating the Issue

After some research, I discovered that this could be happening due to a redirecting issue. To fix it, I added a canonical URL to the <head> section of both HTML pages. This helps tell search engines the correct version of a page, avoiding confusion.

📸 [Canonical tag added in HTML]

🤔 And Then I Found Out About .nojekyll

While researching more about indexing issues on GitHub Pages, I came across something new – a file named .nojekyll.

.nojekyll is a special file you add to your GitHub Pages repo to tell GitHub not to use Jekyll processing.
Why? Because Jekyll, by default, ignores folders that start with an underscore (_), and we don’t want that.

📸 [Explanation of .nojekyll - Reference image]

💻 Making the Change Using Git (From VS Code)

Until now, I always created files manually using the cursor, but this time, I wanted to do it via the Git terminal inside VS Code.

At first, I ran:

add .nojekyll

But got an error because the file didn’t exist yet 😅

📸 [Git error for missing file]

💡 Learning to Create a File via Terminal

Then I Googled it, and finally discovered the correct way to create a new file using the command line:

echo > .nojekyll

And boom! File created 🎉

✅ Staging, Committing, and Pushing Changes

Once the file was there, I staged the change using:

git add .nojekyll

Staging simply tells Git: “Hey! This file exists now. I’m ready to save this change.”

Then committed it:

git commit -m "Added .nojekyll to disable jekyll processing"

And finally pushed to the main branch:

git push origin main

📸 [Staging + Commit + Push process]

🔁 Re-submitted to Search Console

After the file was live, I went back to Google Search Console and resubmitted both pages for indexing.

📸 [Reindexing request]

Still facing the issue? Here is the solution…

Final Cleanup & Indexing Success!

After adding the .nojekyll file and canonical URLs, I noticed that the real issue was with inconsistent URLs - especially those missing the trailing slash (like /about instead of /about/).

🔧 So here’s what I did next:

  • ✅ Updated all internal links (e.g., /about → /about/)

  • ✅ Fixed URLs in the sitemap.xml to include trailing slashes

  • ✅ Set canonical tags with proper URLs (https://ayushhardeniya.site/about/)

  • ✅ Re-submitted URLs and sitemap in Google Search Console

📸 [Updated Sitemap.xml with trailing slash]

🎉 Final Result?

Google indexed the pages successfully!
And I learned the importance of consistent URL formatting - especially on static site hosts like GitHub Pages.

📸 [Search Console showing indexed page confirmation]

This was one of those small but super insightful learning days, and I’m glad I documented it here!;

~Ayush Hardeniya

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Written by

Ayush Hardeniya
Ayush Hardeniya

Hey, I'm Ayush Hardeniya (aka Ayush Sharma) 👋 An engineering student who treats every coding challenge like a 🎮 new level to conquer. Through daily reflections, real-world problems, and code breakdowns, I document my journey --- not just to grow, but to help others grow with me. Because honestly... I don’t code, I play it. 🔥