How to index your website faster on Google.
An ultimate guide of how Google indexing works.
Table of contents
- What is Google indexing?
- The importance of Google indexing
- How Google crawls and indexes new content
- Google patents about crawling and indexing
- Strategies on how to index your web pages faster on Google
- What types of file types does Google index?
- How to use noindex tag to prevent Google from indexing contents on a web document
- If you change a “noindex” tag to an “index” tag, how long will it take for Google to reindex the site?
- Can web pages be indexed without crawling?
- Meta tags and HTTP codes that can affect indexing
- Error messages about Google indexing on the search console
- How to fix Google indexing issues
- How to remove a search result from Google’s index
- How to check if a web page is indexed on Google
Google indexing is necessary for every website that wants to be searchable on the web. It’s one of the first processes a website must undergo before it gets ranked in the search results.
What is Google indexing?
In essence, Google’s search index is its whole collection of websites, which it uses to deliver search results to users. Although it can seem like Google is large enough to lead you to any website on the Internet, that isn’t the case. Search results can only contain indexed sites.
Of course, new websites can always be added to the index; in fact, adding a website to Google’s index is what is referred to as “Google indexing“. Google’s web crawlers, often known as spiders, crawl the Internet for pages to index.
The importance of Google indexing
In fact, Google, which accounts for more than 90% of all Internet traffic, is where most of the traffic that a website receives comes from.
This is why it’s important that your page show up in the Google search results as a being indexed. The process of indexing a page to have it appear in search engine results. More traffic will be generated as a result of your effective Google indexing strategies, and new content will be found more quickly whenever it is posted. This work can be so challenging at times that you need quality link indexing services.
How Google crawls and indexes new content
Even in the early days of the web, before search engines, finding information required searching through directories. What a drag of a process. How did we ever have the patience?
Users now anticipate almost rapid results to their search queries as a result of the revolutionary impact search engines have had on information retrieval.
Search engines index material prior to a search to enable incredibly quick replies to queries.
It would take a very long time for search engines to find pertinent material by going through individual pages looking for keywords and themes. Instead, search engines (like Google) employ an inverted index, also referred to as a reverse index.
A system known as an inverted index collects pointers to the documents that each text element appears in along with a database of those elements. As a result, fewer resources are required to store and retrieve data since search engines can distill words to their essence through a process called tokenization. Comparing all known papers to all pertinent keywords and characters is substantially slower than using this method.
If the Google crawler (“Googlebot”) has visited a page, examined it for content and meaning, and added it to the Google index, then that page is considered to be indexed by Google. If they adhere to Google’s webmaster standards, indexable pages may appear in Google Search results.
Google patents about crawling and indexing
As SEO managers, Google patents are useful in the sense that they help us to know what the search giant has done about their algorithms and what they will do in the future. This will be important in SEO forecasting and effective strategies for organic search campaigns.
The following are Google patents on crawling and indexing:
System and Method for Enabling Website Owner to Manage Crawl Rate in a Website Indexing System
Real-time document collection search engine with phrase indexing
Information retrieval system for archiving multiple document versions
Strategies on how to index your web pages faster on Google
If Google hasn’t indexed a new page or blog post on your website (or perhaps your entire website), it won’t appear in the search results, which you may or may not be aware of.
Although Google is very good at locating content eventually and getting it indexed is never instantaneous, there are a few things you can do to speed things up.
Check to see if the page is in your sitemap: Without a sitemap or if you haven’t uploaded one to Google, your website is missing out on one of the simplest methods to have information indexed. When you include links to pages in your sitemap, you’re essentially telling Google that those pages exist and making it as simple as possible for Google to find them.
Link to important pages to increase traffic: Your website’s most important pages, including the home page, should link to any newly added blog posts. It provides strong signals to Google when you link to your most recent blog post, new resource, or product page from your home page in addition to promoting them to users. Additionally, pages with no incoming links at all are referred to as “orphan pages” and will likely be taken longer to find by Google because they are presumed to be unimportant. Google needs your assistance when deciding how to rank fresh material.
Social media content sharing: Numerous studies indicate that social sharing has developed into a significant ranking component. By promoting your new material on social media, you can put it in front of your target audience right away, which will inevitably result in likes, shares, retweets, and other interactions. Plus, don’t ignore your social media outlets the rest of the time. When you’re ready to promote new material, an engaged audience is much more likely to engage with it.
Drive traffic to the website: Whether attracting visits helps with speedier indexing and higher ranks is still up for dispute. However, given how much information Google collects about user behavior, particularly through Google Chrome, it makes sense that if several individuals began visiting a single page, their systems would start to take note. Through paid search advertisements or sponsored social media postings, you can immediately increase traffic to your website if you’re extremely proud of some fresh material you’ve recently written or are confident that your special offer would be of interest.
Regularly post new content: Create a blog schedule you can follow, or at a regular day and hour, add new promotions to your website. Google enjoys fresh content, and by routinely surfacing new posts on your website, you’ll entice them to visit it more frequently. In light of this, make sure your material is pertinent, well-written, and original. You can face penalties from Google if they find your material to be of low quality, which can be challenging to overcome.
What types of file types does Google index?
Most types of web pages have contents and file types that Google can index. We index the following file types most frequently:
Portable Document Format for Adobe (.pdf)
InDesign PostScript (.ps)
Web Format for Autodesk Design (.dwf)
Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
eXchange Format for GPS (.gpx)
Hanword Hancom (.hwp)
HTML (.htm, .html, other file extensions)
Using Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
Utilizing PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
Windows Word (.doc, .docx)
presentation made in OpenOffice (.odp)
Spreadsheet in OpenOffice (.ods)
Text in OpenOffice (.odt)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Vector images that can be scaled (.svg)
TeX/LaTeX (.tex)
Text, includes source code in popular computer languages (.txt,.text, and other file extensions):
C/C++ source code (.c, .cc, .cpp, .cxx, .h, .hpp)
source code in C# (.cs)
source code for Java (.java)
source code in Perl (.pl)
the Python code (.py)
(.wml,.wap) Wireless Markup Language
XML (.xml)
How to use noindex tag to prevent Google from indexing contents on a web document
The noindex HTML tag prevents bots from indexing a specific page or file on your website and controls how they are treated by them.
By including a noindex directive in a robots meta tag, you can instruct search engines not to index a page. To do this, simply add the following HTML code to the head> section of the page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
A different way to include the noindex tag is as an x-robots-tag in an HTTP header:
x-robots-tag: noindex
A page using the noindex tag won’t be indexed when a search engine crawler like Googlebot visits it. Even if other websites link to the page, Google will remove it from search results if the page was previously indexed and the tag was added afterwards.
In general, meta directives are not rules that search engine crawlers must abide by; rather, they are suggestions. Different search engine crawlers may have different interpretations of the robots meta values.
But the majority of search engine spiders, including Googlebot, abide by the noindex request.
If you change a “noindex” tag to an “index” tag, how long will it take for Google to reindex the site?
If you update a “noindex” tag to an “index” tag, how long it will take Google to reindex the web page depends on how frequently your site is deep crawled. It’s usually short for a website with a lot of links or with lots of visitors.
By using the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to ask for their reindexing, you can hasten the process. The change to meta name=”robots” content=”index”> element ought to make it to be re-indexed after that.
Can web pages be indexed without crawling?
If a URL is restricted by robots.txt, it can still be indexed without being crawled; this is by design.
That often results from links from someplace, and based on that amount, I assume it’s from somewhere on your website.
Robots.txt is not an index management tool; it is a tool for managing crawls.
However, robots.txt is only a means of limiting the pages that Google crawls.
Because of this, Google will crawl and index a page if it is linked to from another website (to a certain extent).
The W3c views the Robots.txt file as serving as a sort of gatekeeper for which files are downloaded. Retrieved denotes that a robot that adheres to the Robots.txt exclusion protocol crawled the page.
Meta tags and HTTP codes that can affect indexing
Redirects: When a website changes domain names or when pages are transferred to a new address, 301 redirects are frequently employed. When this happens, Google indexes the new content in place of the old one on the search results. A 301 redirect won’t harm your SEO, but it must be implemented properly to prevent your website’s rankings from being impacted.
Rel canonical tag: An effective way to inform search engines about your website’s preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the internet is to include a rel=canonical link in it. Several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google, support it. The rel=canonical link defines the URL you want to appear in search results as well as combining indexing properties from the duplicates, such as their inbound links.
Indexifembedded: You now have more control over the indexing of your content thanks to a new robots tag called indexifembedded. With the indexifembedded tag, you may inform Google that even if the content page has the noindex tag, you still want your material to be indexed when it is embedded via iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages.
Error messages about Google indexing on the search console
When search engines are unable to properly add your website to their databases, indexing issues happen. There are several possible causes for this. Such mistakes are important because they will have a negative impact on your results, which will reduce the visibility and organic visitors to your website.
You may check the indexing status of your webpages with Google Search Console and fix any issues its bots have identified. Since the majority of people use Google to conduct searches, this can greatly increase the visibility of your material.
The list of common indexing issues are:
Submitted web pagemarked ‘noindex’
Submitted web page blocked by robots.txt
Submitted web page has crawl issue
Submitted web page not found (404)
Submitted web page returns unauthorized request (401)
Redirect Error
Server error (5xx)
How to fix Google indexing issues
For your content to appear in search results, Google must have indexed your website. You can find it difficult to boost your organic traffic if there are issues with crawling or indexing your website.
We provided a list of indexing problems in Google Search Console in this content. To fix this, you can diagnose the problem through GSC and fix the problem through the help of a developer or by yourself if you are technical. After you address the problem that prevented Google from crawling your pages, don’t forget to submit them for re-indexing.
How to remove a search result from Google’s index
You can delete pages directly from the website, make use of the Remove Outdated Content tool, or use the Remove URLs tool, among other options.
The simplest method to prevent a site URL from appearing in search results is to use the Google URL Removal tool.
Since this program merely needs a fresh Google mail account, users find it easy to use. The next 4 steps should be completed if you already have a Google account:
Go to the Google Search Console.
Navigate to the Remove URLs area using the left-hand menu.
In the URL removal text area, type the file’s URL and then submit it.
To prevent Google crawlers or other bots from indexing similar pages again, add the no-index tag to the page.
How to check if a web page is indexed on Google
There are various methods for determining whether a website, webpage, or domain has been indexed by Google.
Using a search operator is the quickest and simplest approach to determine whether a specific webpage has been indexed.
If the page has been indexed, Google’s site: or info: search operators will let you know.
Simply copy the website’s URL from the address bar and enter it in Google with either site: or info: before it.
For instance, you can type the following to see if a particular page has been indexed:
site:https://domain.com/example/
It is indexed if the webpage appears in the search results. It is not indexed if you receive nothing back.
Google Search Console is a different tool you can use to check for indexed pages.
You must add and verify your website or property in Search Console if you haven’t previously.
Once you’ve done that, Search Console’s numerous reports and statistics will be available to you.
In Search Console, you should be able to see a box that begins, “Inspect any URL in,” followed by your site URL. Make sure you have chosen the correct search property, which is your website.
Just enter the URL of the page whose indexing you wish to check into this box to get started.
The report will contain the statement “URL is on Google” if it has been indexed.