Before we dig into the hows of Google indexing, first let’s settle Whats of Google indexing is. There are a lot of terminologies that you might not be familiar with, here we will try to feed you that. Google uses spider bots to find the content for its search results. They are programs that roam around the internet, the websites that allow them to crawl them, the spider bots report about those websites to search engines.
Since all the search engines have their own spiders and they have names for their bots. So, you can block or unblock them as per choice and need. The process in which a spider bot crawls the website is called crawling. Google bots use this process to understand the content of the websites.
The indexing phase comes after the crawling process, this is the phase where Google processes the crawled data and adds it to the Google index. If you have a website that was made by professionals you should not have any trouble getting your content indexed. If you are having a hard time indexing your website or its content hire the best WordPress developers in Toronto.
Why Google Is Not Indexing My Website?
The most common tool that everyone uses to check their website indexation in Google is the search operator site: Use the site: operator and type your website URL as site:https://digitaltreed.com then press enter. Google will show all the indexed URLs on your website. If some of the URLs are missing or the page is blank then there could be the following reasons restricting Google from indexing your website.
Faulty servers:
Your server might be restricting the google crawlers from crawling your website.
Google Penalty:
If the website has been penalized in the past.
Server Issues:
The server might not be responding or the server’s configuration is not working properly.
Bad Configuration:
Your WordPress site or its SEO settings are configured badly
Not Making Efforts To Get Indexed:
You haven’t taken any measures to get indexed or haven’t even optimized the website for search engines properly.
New Website:
Depending on the content and structure of the website a new website can take 4 days to 4 weeks to get indexed by Google.
Disable “Discourage Search Engines” In WordPress:
During the development of the website, no one would want the crawlers to visit their website. Because most of the content gets uploaded and altered later in a matter of days. If the crawler observes such sudden changes daily it might flag the website and won’t crawl it at all. Also, there is a chance of being caught by the crawler while uploading the dummy content, which is even worse for the WordPress Website indexing.
The indexing problem occurs when the WordPress developers forget to revert the changes after the development process. As in they keep the crawlers blocked from crawling the website and this makes the website non-indexed despite being live and uploaded.
In WordPress websites, the most common mistake is to keep the “discourage search engines from indexing this site” it keeps the crawlers away from the website. It also updates the website robots file with the ‘no-index, no-follow tag. When the crawler sees the no-follow tag in the robots they honor it and abandon the website. To avoid this from happening try un-check from setting>Reading.
Generate the Robots.txt
Robots.txt is one of the important tools to directly communicate with search engines. This file is also used to navigate the search engines crawlers through the website. For example, most webmasters don’t prefer the search engines to index the contact us page. Sometimes if the WordPress website is being used for eCommerce purposes the cart pages won’t be ideally indexed. To control the restrictions and welcome the Google bots use the Robots.txt file.
Create A Sitemap
A sitemap is a document that has a list of your website’s URLs. It guides the search engines on what pages you have to offer. Using the sitemap you can also set the priority for the URLs, this priority helps the crawlers to understand how frequently they should crawl the said page. More priority is set for the pages that are frequently changed or updated.
The most trusted tool by the users for generating the sitemaps is Google XML Sitemaps. Though there are several other tools too such as Yoast and other plugins, whatever tool you use make sure that your Sitemap is submitted and all the necessary URLs are listed in it. To check the sitemap of your website manually type https://digitaltreed.com/sitemap-index.xml
Sign Up for Google Analytics:
Though Google Analytics is used to access the numbers of users acquisition and their behaviors. But do set it up because it can be beneficial for understanding the pages that are low-performing or the pages that are not being discovered organically. Then you can assess whether they are indexed or not.
A hidden catch is that when you set up google analytics, you just give Google a signal that there is a website that its crawlers missed to index. There isn’t sufficient data about it but the word is that it helps websites index quickly.
Submit Your Site In Google:
Submitting your website in google is the manual way of telling Google that your website exists. This is making sure that you have done all you could and now Google has to index your website. Also, why wait for Google to index your website why not make an effort yourself?
Use Google’s Search Engine Console tools for submitting your website in Google’s index manually. Sign up in the search console and set it up for your website, then submit your sitemap in the search console. The search console doesn’t only help you to manually index the website but it also helps you understand what Google thinks about your website and improve your website.
Crawl Errors And How To Remove Them?
The beauty of Google Search Console is that it can guide you where in your website what specific error is causing Google not to index the website content. You can check the crawl errors window for better insights and then make the technical fixes. Sometimes there are URLs with 404 errors and sometimes the errors are from the server-side. Whatever is bothering Google from reaching your website will be cleared in this section.
How Much Does It Take For New Websites To Get Indexed?
Mostly, it takes 4 days to a month for a new website to get indexed. But the indexation depends on the quality of the content and the website. For some websites, it may take more than the said time to get indexed taking the overall time for a little bit longer. For this, you should have patience and not rush and do spammy link building as most webmasters do.