Last Updated on April 5, 2024 by Saira Farman
Do you know whether the pages of your website are indexed or not? If not, then you must. You cannot skip indexing before your website is displayed. It is because ignoring indexing means you are telling search engines not to rank the pages and the search engine interprets this as incorrect loading of your pages or too much redirection. Thus, you are putting your website at risk by deteriorating its ranking. Let’s get into more details.
What is indexing?
A collection of websites that Google is aware of makes up the majority of the Google index. When these pages are indexed, Google can then use the information. The search engine may choose whether to include your content in the search results.
The vital steps Google follows when indexing
- To discover a URL: Google pulls links from recently found web pages while browsing the internet.
- Crawling: After that, Google must visit the pages and use its algorithms to determine which URLs should be given priority. The Googlebot then visits the pages that meet the priority level.
- Indexing: Google grabs a page’s content. After which determines its uniqueness by performing a rigorous quality check. Google also checks the page layout and other features at this level of indexing. When Google determines everything is in order, the process is complete.
Do all of the pages get indexed?
Google does not promise that every page will be indexed. Only 1/10th of a larger website may be indexed. Furthermore, 16% of worthwhile and indexable pages are not always indexed. Therefore, the goal of indexing is not to include every single web page.
However, you can help Google index your entire site by implementing the best SEO practices as suggested by the leading SEO experts in India.
Is indexing time-consuming?
After one day from publication, Google only indexes 56% of indexable URLs. Just 87% of the URLs are indexed after two weeks.
Helpful tips on how to enhance the indexability of your website
Let’s now see how you can improve your site’s indexability by following the steps mentioned below.
1. Use the Google search console to monitor the status of crawls:
The reason why you must check the crawl status on your site is to identify any issues. If you detect any error in the crawl status, it means more serious problems on your site. So, to detect errors and fix them, you need to track the crawling status daily.
Your site’s crawl status is available right below the index tab. So try to keep a track of it at least every 30-60 days.
Crawl errors you may find:
You may come across DNS errors, robots.txt errors, 404 errors, and server errors.
How to fix them:
- Utilize some URL inspection tools which will assist to check how Google sees your site.
- To get rid of the DNS errors you must take the help of your DNS provider.
- Server errors occur due to some common errors like ‘no response’, ‘connection refused’, ‘Timeout’ etc. Although these problems are only momentary, you might need to contact your hosting providers if they continue.
- You can submit a robots.txt site map to help resolve robots.txt problems. Additionally, you have the option to manually exclude pages that can cause crawling issues from indexing.
Simply resolving these issues will allow search engines to index all of your site’s target pages.
2. Mobile-friendly web pages are important:
If you create desktop versions for your website, those will be indexed and shown under a mobile index. On the ranking of your website, this will have a negative effect. As a result, you must create web pages that are optimized for mobile devices and keep the following in mind:
- Pick responsive designs for your site
- Don’t forget to insert meta tags
- Use AMP cache for tagging pages
- Speeding up load times by optimizing images
Pro tip:
To evaluate your website on a mobile device, you must utilize Google Page Speed Insight.
3. Submitting a sitemap:
For indexation, submitting a sitemap to the Google search console is undoubtedly a wise move. Use a sitemap generator to build an XML version. By simply labelling the canonical version of each page that has duplicate content, you can also generate it manually.
4. Updated content:
Your website’s content will always make an impact on your site’s SEO ranking. That’s why top SEO experts in India always suggest publishing new content on your site regularly. Mostly, this will make it easier for search engines to routinely crawl your website. Furthermore, a website with updated content shows that the site is developing, which is why frequent crawling is necessary.
5. Proper interlinking:
You have to focus on building a website that maintains a proper information architecture. This will help you to ensure that you are maintaining an organized website. Organize all of your web pages by categorizing them into different groups and connecting them. Search engines will be able to properly index web page content as a result.
6. Speed up your site:
You will need to work on speeding up how quickly your site’s pages load. By minifying on-page resources like CSS, you may make your website load faster, especially on mobile. For a faster crawl, you can also turn up compression and caching.
7. Customize crawl rate:
Nowadays, you can alter the crawl rate using an earlier version of Google Search Console. You can change the crawling speed that suits your needs. In the meanwhile, you can also make the necessary modifications or changes.
Conclusion
Your website’s SEO rating is important, thus indexing is necessary. Receiving an index, though, is not simple as we’ve said. As a result, you must continue to use some tactics to aid search engines. Consider the advice we’ve given in this post as a result. Hiring the top SEO specialists would be a wise option because, above all, experts know the best solution.
