Indexing Website Pages
Do you want more organic search traffic to your site?
Organic search traffic is critical for growing your website and business. According to some research, organic search accounts for approximately 53% of your site’s traffic. However, if Google doesn’t index your website, you are pretty much invisible. Your site will not show up in the search results. You won’t appear in any search queries, and you won’t get any organic traffic either.
What does it mean to index your website?
Website indexing is a method that search engines use to understand the function of your website and each page on your website. By doing this, Google finds your site, adds it to its index, associates each page with searched keywords, returns it on search engine results pages (SERPs), and ultimately gets the right people to your content.
When you search for something on Google, you ask the search engine to return all the relevant pages from its index. However, not every page you publish online will be noticed by a search engine. For your website to be included in this index, you need to do a few things. There are a few key elements that Google looks for when indexing a website, which includes:
- In line with popular searches
- The page is linked to other pages on and off your site.
- The website’s homepage is easily navigable.
- A website’s indexation isn’t blocked because of specific metatag usage
Why do you need Google and another search engine to index your site?
The answer is simple. If you want your site to show up in the search engine result, it must be indexed.
Search engine results, specifically Google, generate the majority of traffic. It is therefore essential for your site to appear within Google results. You call this “indexing,” a process of making your site appear in search engine results. You will get more traffic when you successfully index, and your new content will be found more rapidly when you post it. So often, this job is quite challenging that you need a good SEO specialist to do this.
However, you don’t want your site to be indexed just once. You want the search engines to keep re-indexing your site. Search engines like Google don’t just update automatically. Instead, they rely on Googlebots or “Spiders” to crawl the web pages.
How do you get your web pages indexed by Google?
If Google doesn’t index your webpage, try this:
- Open the Google Search Console
- Click on the URL inspection tool
- In the search box, paste the URL you’d like Google to index.ar.
- Google will verify the URL
- Click on “Request indexing.”
Follow this process when publishing new pages or posts. With this, you are telling Google that something new has been added to your site, so Google should check it out. If requesting indexing isn’t solving the problem, then try these:
- Remove crawl blocks: Google may not index your website due to crawl blocks in your robots.txt file. The robots.txt file could also be blocking Google from indexing a single page.
- Build high-quality backlinks: A backlink signals Google that a page is essential. These are pages that Google wants to index. Of course, Google does not only index web pages with backlinks. There are plenty of indexed pages with no backlinks. Google, however, considers high-quality links to be of greater importance. As a result, they’re more likely to crawl and recrawl such pages quicker than those without high-quality backlinks. This makes indexing quicker.
- Remove rogue no index tags: If you tell Google not to index your pages, they won’t. This is useful if you want to keep certain web pages private.
- Remove rogue canonical tags: It’s a snippet of HTML code that defines the main version for duplication, near-duplication, and similarity. You can use canonical tags to indicate which version of the same or similar content should be indexed if it’s available under multiple URLs.
However, if you have a rogue canonical tag on your page, then it could tell Google about a preferred version of the page that doesn’t exist. In this case, your page won’t be indexed.
- Include the page in your sitemap: Your sitemap tells Google which pages are most important and which are not. You may also learn how often they need to be recrawled from this. Regardless of whether your sitemap includes them, Google should be able to find the pages on your website. Including them, however, is still a good idea.
- Fix nofollow internal links: Nofollow links are links with a nofollow attribute. These links prevent PageRank from being transferred to the destination URL. In addition, nofollow links are not crawled by Google.
- Make sure the page isn’t orphaned: Orphan pages do not have any internal links pointing to them. As Google crawls the web for new content, orphaned pages cannot be discovered through that process. Neither can visitors to a website find them. Use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to find orphaned pages on your site. After that, check the Links report for any “Orphan page (no internal links)” errors.
- Be sure the page has value and is unique: Low-quality pages are unlikely to be indexed by Google since they have no value for its users.
- Add strong internal links: Crawling your website enables Google to discover new content. You may not be able to locate a specific page if you fail to link to it internally.
To solve this problem, you could add some internal links to the page. This can be done from any web page Google crawls and indexes. You should, however, use one of your most “powerful” pages if you want Google to index the page as quickly as possible.
- Remove low-quality pages: Your website will only waste the crawl budget if you have too many low-quality pages. By wasting server resources on these pages, crawl activity will be diverted from pages that have value and may cause a delay in discovering valuable content your site has to offer.