How To Get Your Website Indexed on Google: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you want your website to appear in Google search results, it needs to be crawled and indexed by the search engine. If it isn’t indexed, you can say goodbye to any hopes you might have had of ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and any organic website traffic and sales that would result from that. If you want to know, “How do I get my website indexed by Google?” you’re in the right place as we’ve put together this handy guide on how to index your website on Google.

What is a Google Index?

In simple terms, Google’s index is a database of all the web pages that it has crawled and then ‘indexed’ to use as search results. It contains billions of pages and if your pages haven’t been indexed, they simply won’t appear in results.

The Google index stores metadata and text from each page, so when a user makes a search query, it can display relevant results. So essentially, when you enter a search query, you’re searching Google’s index of results.

What Does Google Indexing Mean?

To understand what Google indexing means, it helps to know what the search engine’s process is when it comes to the results it displays.

In basic terms, there are 3 steps involved:

1. Crawling: Google bots crawl the web to look for new pages or updates to existing ones.
2. Indexing: Once a page has been crawled, Google analyses, arranges, and then stores – or indexes – it.
3. Ranking: When a user makes a search query, Google’s algorithm selects the best and most relevant pages to show in the SERPs.

Without knowing how to get your website indexed on Google, you won’t have any search engine traffic because the search engine simply won’t know your site exists.

How Long Before A Web Page Gets Indexed On Google?

The time it takes for Google to index a new web page can vary from a few hours to weeks. However, most new web pages are indexed in the first week after they’ve been published. Many factors can determine how quickly your website gets indexed, but there are some things you can do to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible.

How To Get Your Website Indexed By Google: Steps To Follow

The following steps will help you with how to index a site with Google.

Step 1: Check That Your Site Isn’t Already Indexed

Before you have Google index your site, it’s a good idea to check if it’s already indexed. There are 2 ways to do this. The first is to go to Google and search for your website by typing ‘site:yourwebsitename.com’. Then, you can see how many results there are.

To check that a certain page is indexed, it’s best to use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console (GSC), which will tell you if the page is on Google or not. This is the second method you could use.

Step 2: Request Indexing For Your Homepage

If your homepage is showing as not being on Google through GSC’s URL Inspection Tool, then you can select ‘Request Indexing.’ If your site structure is up to scratch, Google will be able to find and index the pages on your website.

Step 3: Create and Submit a Sitemap

A sitemap tells Google where to find the important pages on your website. Lots of website platforms can generate a sitemap for you. Once you have this, you need to submit it to Google via the ‘Sitemaps’ tab in GSC.

Step 4: Check Site Structure

The structure of your website helps Google understand which pages are important. Internal links signal to Google that a page is important. The search engine should be able to get to every important page through internal links. Pages that don’t have any internal links going to them are called orphan pages, and Google is less likely to index them because there are no internal links telling it that these pages are important. There are lots of ways to structure your site, but the pyramid structure is most efficient.

Step 5: Look For Mistakes In Robots.txt file

The robots.txt file tells Google which parts of a website it should crawl and which it should ignore. It does this with ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’ instructions. It’s common for duplicate pages and other pages that contain PDF resources, for example, to have a disallow instruction on them. If your site is not getting indexed by Google, you might have a rogue disallow instruction telling search engine crawlers not to crawl your entire site so check for this.

Step 6: Remove Noindex Tags You Don’t Want

Just like having a misplaced disallow instruction in your robots.txt file, you could have an accidental noindex tag blocking Google from crawling and indexing your site. You can check this in GSC in the pages report of the indexing section. If the pages you want to be indexed have the noindex tag, simply remove it to get your pages crawled and indexed.

Step 7: Check for Nofollow Tags

Your website and its pages may not be being indexed because you have rel=”nofollow” tags on your internal links. This tells Google bots that they don’t need to crawl those pages and their content so the page can’t appear in search results. Check that you don’t have any incorrect nofollow tags and remove any where you want a page to be indexed. Google will then be able to follow the links and index them.

Step 8: Focus on Quality Backlinks

As well as internal linking, you should focus on building quality backlinks to your site. Every backlink you acquire from an authoritative, industry-relevant website tells Google that your website has valuable content and should be indexed. Check out your competitors’ backlinks and try to replicate these. Directories, listicles, guest posts, and interviews are all great ways to earn links that will help Google favour your site.

If you’ve been wondering how to get your website indexed by Google, these tips should help you. Quite often, the solution is simple, and your pages will be indexed for ranking by making these changes. Remember that the time it takes the search engine giant to index your pages can vary depending on your website, so you might need to be patient.