Who doesn’t want more organic search traffic to their website? We all do, right? Organic search traffic is significant for growing your website and business. Well! To drive organic traffic to your website, you need to be visible on the dominant search engine in the first place. And, to make your website visible, it needs to be indexed. If Google does not index your website, then you are essentially invisible. You won’t appear in any search queries, and end up receiving no organic traffic whatsoever. So, let us dive into facts on how to get Google to index your site easily and efficiently and the roadblocks to avoid hitting.
Before getting into the details of how to get your website indexed, let’s first go over a simplified explanation of how Google’s indexing works.
How Does Google Index a Site?
Websites that aren’t indexed aren’t included in Google’s database. As a result, these websites cannot be displayed on the search engine’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
To be indexed, websites must be “crawled” by Google’s web crawlers (Googlebot).
- Crawling: The website is crawled by search engine bots to determine if it’s worth indexing. Web spiders, also known as “Googlebots,” are constantly crawling the internet and following links on existing web pages in search of new content.
- Indexing: In this process, every web page is stored in a vast database (in Google’s case, its “Index”).
- Ranking: The webpage is then ranked by the search engine according to criteria like relevance and user-friendliness.
Simply put, indexing means storing a website in Google’s databases. However, it doesn’t guarantee that it will appear at the top of the SERPs. Predetermined algorithms that take into account factors like web user demand and quality checks control indexing. You can influence indexing by managing how web spiders discover your web content.
Also, do not miss the most essential “noindex” tags.
Google won’t index web pages if you tell them not to. This is useful for keeping some web pages private. Web pages with the below meta tags in their <head> section will not be indexed by Google:
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>
This is a meta robots tag, which tells search engines whether to index or not to index the page. If you want Google to index your page you need to change this “noindex” value to “index”.
How do you get Google to index your website?
Well! There are two options. You can just sit back, do nothing, and wait for Google to take action. Google will eventually take care of it if there are no errors, although it can take weeks or months. The second option is to improve Google’s ability to find your site and speed up the process, giving you more time to focus on raising your conversion rate, improving your online visibility, and, of course, creating and promoting some excellent content. So, here are a few strategies on how to get your website indexed quickly and easily.
1) Create an XML Sitemap
Your website’s URLs and details about the pages are listed in XML sitemaps. It enables Google to navigate your sitemap and identify the website pages you want to be indexed. You can create a sitemap that gets automatically updated by using plugins like XML sitemap generators.
2) Add Powerful Internal Links
Google crawls your website to find new content. So, including some internal links on the website is a great way to assist Google in locating your pages. After publishing, make sure your pages are linked together and upload hyperlinks to new content. You can do this from any other web page that Google can crawl and index. However, it makes sense to do so from one of your more “powerful” pages so that Google indexes the page as quickly as possible.
Why? Google is more likely to crawl these pages more quickly than less significant pages.
3) Prioritize High-Quality and Valuable Content
Low-quality pages are unlikely to be indexed by Google because they serve no purpose for users. Your website or web page must be “great and inspiring” for Google to index.
If technical problems do not cause the lack of indexing, the problem may be with the content. Because of this, it’s important to look at your web pages again and consider whether they are valuable. Is it useful for users? If the answer to any of these questions is “NO,” you need to improvise your content.
4) Eliminate Low-Quality Pages (to optimize “crawl budget”).
Simply put, the more pages your website has, the longer it will take Google to crawl your website’s pages. Too many low-quality pages on your website merely waste the crawl budget and make it difficult for Google to get to your most important pages first. It’s a great idea to remove low-quality pages from your website. It can only increase the quality of your website and have a beneficial impact on your crawl budget.
5) Check your robots.txt file
Since it serves as a guide for search engine crawlers, robots.txt files are a crucial SEO tool. Make sure your robots.txt grants Google access to crawl your website.
If your robots.txt file is not configured properly, you may unintentionally “disallow” Google bots from crawling your site, or particular pages on your site that you want Google to index. To resolve these problems, you must remove the relevant “disallow” directives from the file.
6) Use Canonical Tags Correctly
Crawlers can determine which version of a page is preferred using canonical tags. Without a canonical tag, Googlebot understands that a page is the preferred version and the only version of that page, and it will index that page. On the other hand, even if the alternative version doesn’t exist, Googlebot won’t index a page that contains a canonical tag since it will believe that there is a different preferred version of the page. You can use Google’s URL Inspection tools to check for canonical tags.
7) Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks tell Google that a particular web page is important. After all, it must be valuable if someone is connected to it. Google indexes these pages.
Google doesn’t just index websites that have backlinks. Numerous (billions of) indexed pages exist without any backlinks. However, because Google values pages with high-quality links more, it will probably crawl and re-crawl these pages more quickly than the ones without. This results in faster indexing.
8) Publish your URLs to the Google Search Console
Even though Google may already be aware of, crawling, and maybe indexing your new or modified pages, you should still submit URLs to Google Search Console. By doing so, you will also be able to hasten the ranking process.
9) Submit your Sitemap to Google Search Console
Submitting your XML sitemap to Google Search Console helps you track your website’s indexing status. Although Google will ultimately crawl your website, publishing a sitemap accelerates the crawling process.
If you are looking to enhance search engine ratings and optimize your website, we at Brightpixel are here to help you. We are a team of passionate digital marketers who want to help you attract customers with a strategy and solutions tailored to your business. Reach out to us now and expand your business exponentially.
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