9 Proven Ways to Get Google to Index Your Website Right Away
To rank on Google or any other search engine, the pages on your website must be indexable, including landing pages, blogs, homepages, and other online content. An index is like a database. Search engines index the sites and provide relevant information to users.
However, Google search engines won’t find your page if it isn’t indexed. This is terrible news for those trying to get organic traffic to their websites via search engines. Hopefully, the above information clarifies how indexing works and why it’s so important.
In this article, we shall discuss the detailed information on fixing some common technical SEO errors and how to get Google to re-index a page on google if it is not indexed yet. So, let’s get started.
What Is Google’s Index?
In simplest terms, Google’s index contains a list of all web pages that bots crawl and analyze. In the absence of Google’s indexation, your website won’t be found in its search results. A similar situation would occur when you create a product, but no stores or marketplaces carry it.
There would be no way for people to find your product. They perhaps even never know that it exists. There’s an extremely high probability that a consumer looking for that product would have difficulty finding it. This is why Google indexing plays a crucial role in generating traffic or making profits.
Why Is Website Indexing Important?
Google’s database does not contain websites that are not indexed. As a result, search engine results pages (SERPs) cannot display these websites. Web crawlers (Googlebot) are required to “crawl” a site in order to index it.
Do you want to know more about how search engines work to rank your pages? Here are the 3 ways:
- Crawling
The search engines crawl websites to determine their worthiness for indexing. Googlebot, or web spiders, constantly search the Web to find new content by following link anchors on existing pages.
- Indexing
When a website is added to a search engine’s database (in Google’s case, its “Index”), it shows the website to users. This means the search engine has indexed the website.
- Ranking
Search engines rank the website according to metrics like relevance and user-friendliness.
Google indexes a website when it stores it in its database. However, this does not guarantee whether the pages appear at the top of the SERPs or not. There are predetermined algorithms that control indexing, which consider web user demand and quality checks, among other factors. As such, you can manage how spiders locate your online content and influence indexing accordingly.
Crawling vs. Indexing
Most people are confused between crawling and indexing. So, here are the clear differences between crawling and indexing. Read on.
Search engine optimization refers to crawling as “following links.” Indexing a web page into Google Search adds the pages to its search results. Indexing is performed through crawling. Google indexes web pages as they are crawled. Crawling is the process where Google bots visit any link. On the other hand, indexing is the process of crawlers saving or cataloging the link in their database.
Google will visit your website to track its performance. Google’s spiders or crawlers are responsible for this process. Crawling and indexing are two separate processes since the result of crawling is indexed by Google (i.e., web search).
Search engine bots crawl the Web to find pages that are publicly available. The indexing process involves search engine bots crawling web pages and saving a copy of every bit of information to show the user relevant results on the search engine when a search query is performed.
Finding web pages and putting them into queues for indexing is performed by this program. By analyzing the content of the web pages, it indexes the ones with the best quality content. Taking part in crawling means search engine bots actively scan your website.
Adding a page to an index is known as indexing. A site’s index is built by putting every significant word appearing in the title, heading, alt tags, subtitles, meta tags, and other positions on the page into its index. In recursive visits of input, the web crawler discovers URLs of web pages from recursive visits.
9 Proven Ways to Get Google to Index Your Website
Check WordPress Settings for Search Engine Visibility
It would be best to start by making sure your WordPress site is search engine-friendly. Go to the Settings and then to the reading page. Then, scroll down to the option that says “Search Engine Visibility.” This option should not be checked, as search engines need access to index and crawl your website.
Fetch As Google – Google Search Console
Another way to index your website quickly is to crawl your site and submit it to Google. It’s so convenient to crawl the entire website at any time. Here are a few steps to add a web page to the Google index in the search engine console.
Step #1: Go to Google Search Console >> URL Inspection
Step #2: Enter the page URL that you want to inspect.
Step #3: Next, a popup box would appear. This would indicate that the URL is being inspected. You can then click on “Request Indexing” after it is finished. It will take a few moments to complete.
Your website will now be added to Google’s index queue. Your page will be crawled shortly by Googlebot.
Create a Sitemap and Submit It to Google for Indexing
To index your website, Google can use your sitemap, which is a high-level overview of your site. Creating a sitemap is the first step in submitting your website. To do this, you will need a tool like the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin, which is free to download.
It’s a plugin designed by Google to ensure your website index is current within the search engine. Google will have a new view of your content when you submit a sitemap, and crawling your website will be faster.
The primary purpose is to give Google a snapshot of every page on your website. Creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google regularly is one of the proactive ways to get your site indexed.
A URL for the sitemap will be provided through the console when you generate a sitemap. Submitting this URL is all that is required. Please ensure you submit your sitemap in the correct format at [yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml].
XML-sitemaps.com is another website method that you could use to create a sitemap.
You can create sitemaps for Google, whether you use Google’s plugin or this website. Search engines use that information to generate a comprehensive index of your website.
Check Your Robots.txt File for Any Crawl Blocks
When Google doesn’t index your entire site, it might be because there is a robots.txt file blocking Google’s crawlers from finding it.
Look for the following code snippets in yourdomain.com/robots.txt:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Google knows not to crawl any of your website’s pages using this code snippet. “REMOVE” them to fix this problem. Enter the URL into the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to find out if there is a crawl block for a specific page. The coverage block should show you a message such as “Crawl allowed? No: blocked by robots.txt.”
Automatic Indexing via The Google Indexing API
The Google Indexing API allows sites with many short-lived pages, such as job postings, event announcements, and Livestream videos, that automatically request the search engine to crawl and index new content.
It is, therefore, the most efficient way for Google to maintain its index as it allows you to push specific URLs. Using the Indexing API, you can try particular URLs.
Update a URL: Notify Google of an updated or new URL for crawling.
Remove a URL: Remove an old page from your website and inform Google about it.
Get the status of a request: View the last time Google crawled the URL.
Add Internal Links for Improved Indexing
The more links you have on your website, the more effectively the search engines will crawl the content, and in turn, they will index your website. The search engine bots and your human visitors alike enjoy internal links.
As a website owner, you are responsible for providing your readers with a comprehensive, user-friendly experience. And you can achieve this by providing Internal links. You can use internal links to direct your website visitors to an additional page on which they can get more detailed information about a particular topic.
Providing internal links makes it easier for people to explore your website, and your pages will be crawled and indexed more frequently. Moreover, it contributes to improving the navigational structure of your website, making it Google-friendly. Your website visitors are prompted to learn more about your site, which means no part of it remains dormant.
Increase Social Sharing of Your Web Pages
Your blog articles will gain more exposure if you include social sharing icons. These buttons will encourage users to share your content with their friends and family. If the users get connected to your content, they can easily share the content on various social media handles.
As a result, it creates more links that will lead back to your website. Linking to your site from multiple sources increases traffic to the linked pages, signaling Google that the pages should be indexed.
Ask Others to Link to Your Website
Using influencers and other popular sites in your niche to generate traffic is another way to boost your site’s indexing. You can open up new incoming traffic channels by earning backlinks from credible websites, engaging in influencer marketing, and publishing guest blog articles.
This process involves building your site’s online authority, and backlinks from reputable sites with large traffic volumes are vital to achieving those goals.
This is why Google crawls websites like Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube more often than a new site from a small business that no one knows about. By increasing your web authority, Google will be more inclined to crawl and index your site more frequently.
Fix Any no-follow Internal Links
The no-follow attribute on links prevents crawlers and search engines from crawling your page when those links point to a destination URL on another page.
Spam in comment sections was at one point intended to prevent a well-ranked page from suffering from a bad search ranking as a result of seeing a lot of garbage on it. Nonetheless, you will have indexing issues if the rel= “no follow” tag is contained within any internal links within your website.
How to Index Website on Google Fast and Delivers Your Freshest Content
You can easily find out whether Google has indexed your website or not. All you need to do is type in your business name and see a link to your website.
Usually, Google captures each change you make on the website using its high-end indexing technology. The Google spiders will see any changes you make to your site. Users will see what’s new on your site based on their search results if you keep your index up to date.
It’s a good idea to update the content regularly so that Google indexes your site frequently and helps you rank quickly. Moreover, updating the content frequently indexes your overall sites, including new pages that you’ve posted recently.
You don’t want your users to wait very long before accessing a new page on your website. For instance, if you have an e-commerce website that sells phones and recently added a new product page. Upon regularly updating the website pages, you can enjoy quick rankings of the newly added pages.
It can be a tricky business getting your site indexed by Google properly. The worst part is that Google’s May 2020 core update has made indexing web pages more difficult. However, you can boost your SEO performance with high rankings by implementing a proper strategy and checklist. You will face both technical and content-based challenges in this role. If you’d like to know the best practices to implement website traffic and ranking, here are a few digital marketing and SEO courses at DAN Institute.
