Anyone with a website will tell you how important it is to get your site on the first page of Google.
If your site is not showing on Google then you are losing out on tons of customer acquisition opportunities. You need to get your site indexed faster.
With more than 1.74 billion websites on the internet, ranking your site at the top is not easy.
If you Google how to improve a website’s ranking, you’ll see tons of results. However, very few of these topics cover the most basic yet important part, i.e., indexing.
Let’s begin with understanding what is indexing and why it is so important.
What Is Indexing?
Google uses crawlers to follow different hyperlinks to discover if any websites have new content.
Once these crawlers find new code/content on your website, it is added to Google search.
The process of adding new content to Google’s search is called indexing.
Unless your content is indexed, it won’t show up in the search results page ever. This is why it is crucial to ensure Google indexes your website.
While there’s no fixed set time for how long Google takes to index your site, some believe it can take up to six months.
Fortunately, there are ways to speed up this process. Here are a few techniques to get Google to index your website quickly.
Here are some of the ways to make Google index your site faster:
Set Up Google Search Console
If you want to find out more about your site appearance on search results, then you must first set up Google Console.
The Crawl Stats report in the Google Search Console shows Google’s activity on your website for the past 90 days.
If you see any issue in the Google Search Console, make sure to fix it asap. This will help Google index your site faster.
Create And Submit An XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that comprises a list of pages on your website.
The easiest way to help Googlebot to know more about your site is by creating and submitting a sitemap to Google.
You can create a Google XML sitemap using WordPress for free.
You can also use sitemap generators like Screaming Frog and Yoast to generate a sitemap and submit through your Goggle Console account.
A sitemap informs Google which pages on your website are more important. You must include all the pages on your site map to make it easier for Google to locate them and index them appropriately.
Note that you can use the URL inspection tool feature found on Google Console to find out if a specific page is appearing on your site map.
Invest In Link Building
Ideally, Google is more likely to index your site if crawled and indexed sites are linking to your site.
For this reason, you should ensure your site pages has quality links from authority sites.
An authority site, in this case, could be any site that appears on the first page of Google.
Link building is quite an elaborate process. Learn how to create links using content marketing.
Use a Site Crawling Software
Site crawling software helps you understand why search engines are finding it hard to index or crawl your website.
For instance, WooRank can point out all the problems on your site that are stopping Google and other search engines from accessing and indexing your pages.
WooRank also suggests some Search Engine Optimization tips to improve the quality of your web pages.
Clean Your Codes
Another trick for helping Google to index your site faster is ensuring you have a W3C compliant system and cleaning your website’s backend.
Refrain from bloating the codes on your sites.
Also, you can ask your site developer to ensure the text to the HTML ratio on your website is good.
An ideal HTML to text ratio is anywhere between 50 to 70 percent.
Remove Incorrect Canonical Tags
Although I won’t recommend using this tactic unless you are sure there are pages on your site having incorrect canonical tags.
Canonical tags inform Google that a specific page represents the master copy of a URL.
It shows the only version or the most preferred variant of a page that you intend to index. A canonical tag will always have this format:
<link rel=” canonical” href = “/page.html /”
With a rogue canonical tag, Googlebot finds it difficult to find the page you are referencing to index.
It could be that the page you are referring to in the tag does not even exist on your website or the canonical tag is incorrectly pointing to a different page on your site other than the page you are looking to index.
Again, use the Google URL inspection tool to find out if the page exists and whether the canonical tag points to the right URL or not.
Remove Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are the ones that lack internal links.
It takes time for Google to find pages without internal links and index them.
Additionally, internet users might not ever see the page on Google, making it useless in attracting organic traffic.
Therefore, you should ensure that all your site pages have relevant internal links.
Use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to check for any orphan pages in your site.
Once you crawl the pages on this tool, confirm if it provides an “incoming link report error”.
If you find any orphan pages in your site then:
- Remove or delete the page from your sitemap if it is not that important.
- Incorporate the page to the internal link structure of your website if the page is essential.
- Add important internal links to your content.
[Bonus] – Things To Do To Get Your Site Indexed Instantly
- Publish unique, valuable, and original content on your site.
- Optimize your crawl budget by removing all orphaned and useless pages on the sitemap.
- Promote the social sharing of your content by enabling visitors to share it on one tap.
- Fix “nofollow” internal links.
- Share your content on online forums or Q&A sites like Quora.
- Add Schema Markup to make it easier for search engines to better understand your website’s structure.
Final Thoughts
Getting Google to index your site faster can help you rank your content quickly. The tips I have shared here, if combined with SEO, can help your rank and index your pages on Google and other search engines.
If the indexing problem still persists, then make sure that the server hosting your site is not preventing Google from accessing your web pages.
