While Google wears lots of different hats, its main purpose is to provide high-quality content for web searchers. For that to happen, Google has to index websites so it can rank search results. This is a three-step process, starting with crawling the website and then indexing, or organizing and storing, it. Finally, Google pulls from the index and ranks websites. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.
Crawling New And Updated Websites For Indexing
Google uses spiders to crawl new and updated websites. If the site hasn’t been submitted, Google can find it by following links on the web. The links might be on Google My Business pages or another website that Google has already crawled.
While it’s likely that Google will eventually find your website, you can speed up the process by submitting a sitemap to Google. You’ll need to log into the Google Search Console to submit the sitemap. Then, Google will quickly crawl your site. You can also have your website builder submit it for you. For example, if you use the site builder Wix, you can include the Wix SEO Wiz tool. The tool will automatically submit your sitemap to Google for crawling.
After your site has been crawled, Google will go back to it occasionally to check for updates. However, you can speed up this process as well by submitting individual URLs to the search engine. You’ll want to do this if you’ve added important updates to pages on your website. For instance, if you add new services, submit your URL via the URL Inspection tool. That way, Google can quickly crawl and index your changes, allowing you to reach your target market more effectively.
If you aren’t sure your site has been indexed, go to Google and search the site: URL.com. If your website shows up, it’s in Google’s index. However, if it doesn’t, Google still hasn’t crawled it.
Google Indexing and Ranking Websites
Google’s index is essentially a huge database of all the websites it’s crawled. A website needs to be in Google’s index to show up in the search results. When Google crawls a website, it analyzes and then stores the information on the pages in its index. Then, when someone searches for a site, it analyzes the index, ranks the websites, and populates the organic results.
What if Pages Are Missing After Indexing?
What does it mean if Google has crawled and indexed your website, but some of the pages are missing? These pages won’t show up in the search results and can hurt your marketing campaign.
Sometimes, marketers instruct Google’s robots to leave pages out of the index. This might be because of duplicate content or it could be a page that is only meant for the end-user, such as a thank-you page. You don’t want people to find that page and enter your site.
Other times, though, Google can’t effectively crawl and index your site because of a mistake. You might hide content behind login forms or use a search box instead of standard navigation, making it impossible for the crawlers to move around your website. Other mistakes include using JavaScript-enabled navigation or failing to use internal links. These are just some of the possible mistakes.
Indexing: The First Step in Mastering Google
Having Google crawl and index your website is the first step in mastering Google. You cannot reach people if Google doesn’t display your site, so submit it to Google and then check to see which pages are indexed. If your site has any errors, fix them and then resubmit it to Google. Once your site is part of the index, you can begin to generate traffic.
Learning how Google crawls and indexes a website is the first stepping stone to improve your own website’s content. If you need help creating great content for your site, feel free to contact Transformation Marketing today!