Digital Marketing » Blog » Search Engine Optimisation

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Are you having trouble getting your site or new web pages indexed on Google? As a business owner, you may find yourself in a situation where you launched a new website, yet you have no visibility for your site on search engines.

So how do you get your site indexed on Google? Before diving in, let’s understand how indexing works.

So What is Google’s Index?

Picture Google’s index similar to an index in a library which contains information about all the books available in the library. In this case, books will be web pages. As Google bots crawl web pages, it updates them in Google’s index.

So How Critical is Getting Indexed on Search Engines?

To get your website indexed on search engines, you need to ensure that your site is crawlable to search engine bots or crawlers.

You can ensure crawlability by having:

1. Proper site structure
2. Internal linking between main pages
3. Ensure the site is free of server errors
4. Providing access to crawlers by allowing them on robots file
5. Ensure no no-follow links are there etc.

However, do keep in mind that getting crawled is only the first step; search engines use various algorithms to determine whether your webpage qualifies to be indexed. Also, getting indexed is not good enough to drive traffic to your site; to do so, the web pages will have to rank high on the SERPs.

How to Check If My Site is Indexed by Google?

There are two ways to check if your site is indexed on Google:

Use ‘site:’ search operator:

1. Visit www.google.com
2. Simply type in “site:yourdomain.com”
3. Hit Search

This will show you an estimate of how many pages of your site is indexed on Google. If no results appear, then it means your site is not indexed.

This method can also be used to check if any particular page is indexed.

Example: site:yourdomain.com/webpage

Use Search Console:

1. Go to search console
2. Navigate to index section
3. Click on coverage
4. This will show you the number of valid pages indexed

How Do I Get Google to Index My Site?

Website owners can request indexation for their sites with Google by accessing the Search Console. This is the easiest way to get your site indexed.

1. Visit Google Search Console
2. Navigate to the ‘Inspect URL Section’ on top of GSC and enter the URL you wish to get indexed
3. This will tell you if the URL is indexed or not. In case you wish to get the URL to get indexed, click on ‘Request Indexing’.
4. This action can be performed if the content of the page is updated, and you wish Google to index the new version of your webpage.

However, if you are looking to get your new website indexed, you can create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google.

Get your SEO in place

Even if you do all of the above, you may have trouble getting your website or pages indexed. So there’s a few SEO best practices you need to follow:

1. Optimize your robots file
   Your website’s robots.txt file is the first page that a crawler visits before crawling any other pages of your website. So make sure that the bots are not blocked from crawling important pages of your website.
2. Meta robots tag
   Conduct audits to ensure that your webpages do not block crawlers by use of a ‘noindex’ tag.
3. Meta tags
   Like I mentioned before, getting crawled isn’t enough. For search engines to index our pages better, it’s best to have the webpages optimized with meta titles and descriptions.
4. Canonical tags
   Let us try to understand two scenarios:
   1. Let’s say you don’t specify a canonical tag for a page; Google will treat that page as the preferred version and index it.
   2. In case you specify a canonical tag for a page, Google will index the specified canonical URL and not index the version from which it was specified.

Get Expert SEO Advice

Trouble getting your website indexed, building visibility online or driving quality traffic to your site? That’s precisely why you should partner with Bruce Clay MENA to help your business grow online and achieve your business goals through our Search Engine Optimization services.