Indexing is a fundamental phenomenon so that your website can appear on Google and therefore receive visits (organic traffic). If Google's crawlers don't read your content, it's effectively like it doesn't exist for them, and your online reputation will suffer.
Checking the indexing status of a site on Google is a fundamental step to position itself and get visits from search engines. But how exactly does indexing work?
How does indexing a website work?
Google uses programs called bots (spiders or crawlers) to scan the web for new content. Through the links they go from one content to another and include them in their own files. Periodically, they retrace these paths to discover new content and variations of pre-existing ones.
The scanned contents are included in the list of sites from which the search engine can choose those that will potentially be returned to users' searches. Google "fishes" for the sites included in its archives to generate results pages to offer to visitors. The order of the results is called “ranking” and is determined by Google algorithms through evaluations based on a large number of parameters.
Google indexes websites for free and spontaneously. However, this is not the case in all circumstances, certain conditions may make it difficult for trackers to access or store content.
Indexing may be hindered:
- With specific instructions on the page (noindex meta tag) or in the robots.txt file
- From technical issues that prevent crawlers from seeing content
- Due to the presence of identical duplicate content
To ensure that indexing is successful, verify that the page contains enough text to read and that it is unique, that is, not a duplicate of an already indexed page. In this case it may happen that the new content is excluded from Google results. Additionally, the presence of duplicate content risks Google crawlers consuming useless resources that they cannot use to crawl other pages. Google assigns a “crawl budget” to each site, a maximum limit of resources it allocates for crawling, and wasting it on useless resources affects the quality of indexing.
To speed up indexing, you can connect the pages of the site through internal links: crawlers move from one page to another through the links, which favors the passage of bots to the contents of the site and makes indexing be more complete.
To check if a site is indexed, you can:
- Check with tools like Google Analytics if you receive visits from search engines
- Type into Google the formula site: followed by the content address without www
How to index a site on Google?
At this point you may be wondering: How can a site be indexed on Google?
First, if you haven't already, you can activate a Gmail email address, which you can use to sign up for Google Search Console. GSC is a Google service that allows you to manage various technical aspects of the site, including indexing.
For index a particular URL (e.g. new content), you can enter its path in the URL Inspector tool. If the page is not indexed, it will respond that “The URL is not on Google” and you can request that it be crawled.
However, this is a technique to adopt to speed up the discovery of particularly important content, but it should not compensate for a recurring difficulty in indexing.
If this occurs, the source of the problem must be identified to correct it and restore proper tracker capability.
To make indexing easier, we can help Google by giving it an actual list of pages to crawl.
El map The site map is a map that lists all the pages on the website. This file greatly helps Google learn what content is on the site and speeds up the inclusion of elements in its files.
It's not just about index a website , but also to optimize your content to make it easily understandable and valuable to search engines.
For this reason, you may need the help of an SEO consultant, a professional who can guide you through best practices to make your website easily understandable and authoritative for search engines.
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