Do you need more organic traffic to your site? Yes! We all do.
To grow your website or business, organic search traffic is essential. Statistics show that 53% of your website’s traffic can be organic
Traffic doesn’t matter if your site doesn’t appear in the search results.
You have to get your new site indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search results.
You can either opt for the “tortoise” approach, where you sit back, relax and wait for the magic to happen naturally, but this will take longer.
Or you can make it happen quickly. This way, you will give more focus and time to increase your conversions, built up social presence, write and promote your content.
If I talk about myself, I would instead get my sites indexed as quickly as possible, and then I will have enough time to build my audience.
Site indexation may seem a fairly complex task.
It’s not just about writing some content, optimizing search engines, uploading it to the site, and sitting back to wait for the magic to happen.
Not necessarily.
Google’s indexation process is very effective in reaching your marketing goals.
There are many techniques you can take to help Google index your pages faster.
In this article, I’ll share 8 ways to get your site indexed by Google and increase your organic traffic.
Crawling and Indexing
Google finds your new web pages by crawling the website and then add those pages to their index. Google uses a web spider called Googlebot for this process.
Let’s simplify these terms.
- Crawling: Process on the website to discover new content.
- Indexing: Storing your web page in a vast database.
- Web spider: Software to carry out the crawling process.
- Googlebot: Web spider of Google.
Let me explain the process in more detail:
When you search for something in Google, you’re asking Google to show you all relevant pages from their index.
Google’s algorithm has millions of pages that fit the search term, but it sorts out and shows you the most relevant and best results first.
So, Indexing and ranking are 2 different things. In simple terms;
- Indexing is appearing for the race.
- While ranking is winning the race.
You can’t win a race without appearing for it in the first row.
Check if your site is indexed in Google
Go to Google.com, then search for site:yourwebsite.com
The below results are the numbers of your pages Google has indexed. For example, 111 pages are indexed in the above picture.
But, If you want to check the index status of a specific blog post/page, use the same site:yourwebsite.com/blog-post
If your blog post/page isn’t indexed, it will show the following results.
When you go into Google Search Console, you can get an accurate index status of your site’s Coverage report.
Login to your Google Search Console account. In the index bar, click on “Coverage.”
Have a look at valid with and without warning pages.
If valid pages are not zero, then Google has at least some of your pages indexed. If it’s zero, then you are in serious trouble because none of your web pages are indexed by Google.
If you’re not a Google Search Console user, then Sign up as it’s free.
Another way to check if a specific blog post is indexed or not, go to the URL Inspection tool and paste your URL.
If it says, “URL is on Google,” then this page is already indexed.
If your blog post isn’t indexed, it will show the following.
How to get indexed by Google?
If you find that your website or web page isn’t indexed in Google? Follow this:
- Login to Google Search Console
- Go to sitemaps and click on it.
- Enter your site like; https://www.abc.com/sitemap.xml
- Click the “submit” button.
This process is good practice when you make a new site or post. You’re effectively informing Google that you’ve written something new to your site and that they should check it.
However, if indexing problems prevent Google from indexing old pages, follow the checklist below to diagnose and fix the issue.
1) Crawl blocks in your robots.txt file
If Google is not indexing your entire website, it could be due to a crawl block in a robots.txt file.
You check this issue by going to yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
Check out these 2 snippets of code:
| 1 | User-agent: Googlebot |
| 2 | Disallow: / |
| 1 | User-agent: * |
| 2 | Disallow: / |
Both of these codes tell Googlebot that they’re not allowed to crawl your site’s pages.
To fix this issue, remove them.
2) Remove no-index tags
If you don’t tell Google to index your pages, it won’t index.
There are 2 ways to do it:
- Meta tag: Pages with the meta tags of “noindex”in their <head> section won’t be indexed by Google:
| 1 | <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”> |
| 1 | <meta name=“googlebot” content=“noindex”> |
- X-Robots-Tag: Crawlers also respect the X-Robots-Tag; it’s a part of the HTTP header.
You can apply this by changing your server configuration or using a language like PHP.
When you go to the URL inspection bar in Google Search Console, it tells you if Google is blocked from crawling your website or page due to this header.
By entering your URL, you can check for the “Indexing allowed? No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘X-Robots-Tag’ http header.”
3) Submit your page in your sitemap
A sitemap tells Google about the important or least important pages on your site. It may also guide how your pages should be re-crawled.
It’s a good practice to include your pages in a sitemap to help Google find them.
To check if your page is in the sitemap, click on the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console.
If it shows that “URL is not on Google” and “Sitemap: N/A,” it isn’t indexed.
4) Remove canonical tags
A canonical element is an HTML element that tells Google which is the preferred version of a page. It may look like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”/page.html/”>
Most pages either have no canonical tag or self-referencing.
It signals Google that the page itself is the only version and preferred. In simple words, you prefer to index this page.
But if your page has a canonical tag, it may tell Google about a preferred version of your non-existent page, and it won’t get indexed.
To check it, use Google Console’s URL inspection tool.
If canonical points to another page, it will show a warning, “Alternate page with the canonical tag.”
If you want to index the page, you should remove the canonical tag.
5) Nofollow internal links fixation
Nofollow links don’t flow PageRank to the destination URL. Google also doesn’t crawl for nofollow links.
To all the indexable pages, make sure that internal links are followed.
You can do it by using Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to crawl your site.
If you want this page to be indexed by Google, remove the nofollow tag from these internal links, delete the page, or noindex it.
6) Add internal links
Google finds new content by crawling your site. If you neglect, internal linking then it may not be able to find your new pages.
The best solution to this issue is to add internal links to the page. You can link the pages which are already crawled and indexed by Google. But for faster Google indexing, always inter-link to your powerful pages.
Google is likely to re-crawl such pages faster than less important pages.
7) Unique and high-value content
Google will not index your low-quality pages because they provide no value to the users.
Have a look at Google’s John Mueller remarks about Indexing in 2018:
He said that if you want Google to index your web page or website, it needs to be “inspiring and awesome.” Ask yourself: Is this page or post genuinely useful? If a user clicked on it from search engines, would that user find help on this page?
If your answer is “NO” to both of those questions, you must improve the content quality.
8) Build high-quality backlinks
When you build high-quality backlinks, it tells Google that the site is important.
For transparency, Google doesn’t use only index sites with backlinks. But high-quality links help Google crawl and re-crawl your pages faster than those without. That leads to quick Indexing.
Bottom Line
When Google isn’t indexing your web pages or site, there may be 2 reasons:
- Technical issues
- Low-quality & worthless content
In some cases, both of those issues may exist. However, technical issues are far more common. Technical issues lead to the auto-generation of indexable bad-quality content.
Still, if you follow the checklist above, you can surely solve the indexation issue. Always remember that Indexing and ranking are 2 different factors.
Finally, you can get SEO help from professionals to stay on top of marketing and get results much faster.
Let me know about your indexing tactics!
