A Guide On How To Index Your Website In Google
Knowing how to index a website in Google Search is essential if you want your web pages to appear in results for relevant search queries. If Google hasn’t indexed your website, you don’t stand a chance of attracting organic traffic, increasing your brand’s online visibility, or having an uplift in sales. Any effort you’re putting into your website’s SEO will be completely fruitless unless Google can crawl and index it. Our useful guide will tell you everything you need to know about how to index your website in Google. Let’s get into it!
What Is Crawling and Indexing?
Before learning how to index a website in Google, it’s important to understand exactly how the search engine works in terms of identifying the websites that it shows in the results of a search query. It does this by crawling and indexing.
Crawling is when Google bots ‘crawl’ the web to find new pages or existing pages that have been updated. Once the bots have crawled a page to understand its information, they index it. Google’s index is its database of all the web pages it has crawled and stored to then display in relevant search results. When someone makes a Google search query, Google will refer to its index to display relevant results. Getting your site indexed is an important step in ensuring that your SEO efforts directly affect your rankings.
How To Check Website Index Pages In Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) can help website owners keep an eye on their sites and help them identify any issues that are holding their site back from being indexed. To use this helpful tool, you need to verify that you are the owner of your site, and then you will be able to see important information about its indexability.
How To Check Website Index In Google Search Console
Once you’re all set up, you can check if your pages are indexed using GSC’s URL Inspection Tool. Simply paste your URL into the tool, and it will tell you if the page is indexed or not. If it is indexed, happy days! If it’s not, you’ll want to know how to index a website in Google Search Console.
To get the ball rolling, all you need to do is click on the ‘Request Indexing’ button in the URL Inspection Tool. It’s best to do this with your homepage, as then Google will be able to crawl and index the pages on your website if all its structural elements are sound.
How To Improve Your Chances of Easy Indexing
Whether you want to know how to index a new website on Google or an existing one, there are some steps you can take to make the process a whole load easier and to improve your chances of getting your pages indexed (and hopefully ranking) a lot quicker.
Submit a Sitemap
Your sitemap is important because it tells Google more about how your website is structured and where to find the most important pages. To make this easier for Google, get your website platform to generate a sitemap and submit it to GSC.
Internal Linking Structure
To improve the crawlability of your website and the chances of it being indexed, you need to use internal linking. When you use internal links, you are telling Google which pages are important. Pages with no internal links going to them are less likely to be indexed as there is no signal that these are important.
The pyramid structure is a good approach to internal linking as it means that each page has a link to it from a page that is deemed more important than it. If you automatically add links to new content you add to your site, you shouldn’t have any orphan pages in the end.
Check Your Robots.txt File, Nofollow, and NoindexTags
Mistakes with your robots.txt file and use of nofollow and noindex tags can effectively end up blocking Google from viewing and indexing your pages.
- txt File: This file is important as it tells Google what it should crawl and ignore on your website via allow and disallow instructions. If you have duplicate pages, you might want to mark them as disallow so as not to confuse Google. Checking that you have not misplaced any disallow instructions is vital to ensuring your website can be indexed.
- Nofollow Tags: If you have nofollow tags for internal links in the code of your website, this tells Google that it doesn’t need to crawl those pages, therefore, they won’t appear in search results. Remove any incorrect nofollow tags to allow Google to read your site.
- Noindex Tags: Use GSC to check for rogue noindex tags blocking Google from crawling and then indexing your site. If pages that you want to be indexed have these tags, remove them so they can be crawled.
Acquire Quality Backlinks
When you have quality backlinks to your site, it tells Google that your website is helpful and worth indexing and ranking. Every relevant and authority backlink you earn strengthens how Google sees you. Guest posting, blogger outreach, listicles, and directories are great places to get links from, boosting your authority and trust.
Regularly Add New Content
For your website to attract Google’s attention, you need to show that you are producing helpful, new content regularly. If you’re wondering how to re-index my website in Google, this is one of the best ways to do that. The more valuable content you produce, the higher the chances of Google crawling and indexing your site repeatedly.
Take The Stress Out Of Indexing With Linkindexer
If you are fed up with indexing problems, our link indexer service is here to help you. Simply submit your links, and our team will check them for any issues that are holding you back from indexing. We’ll also keep an eye on Google’s index to ensure that nothing changes and that your pages are always visible. Try it today!