How to Index a Website Fast on Google?
Last Updated on 14th September 2023 by Ajmer Singh
Are you looking for ways to index a website fast on Google? This guide should help.
In this article, we will walk you through the entire process of indexing your site.
As a beginner, you will learn what crawling and indexing are.
You will understand why some pages on your site are indexed and why others aren’t.
Finally, you will also learn how to index a website fast on Google.
Having said all that, let’s start.
Before we dive into how to index a site quickly, it’s very important to understand what crawling and indexing are.
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What is crawling?
Let’s say you create a new site and you want your site to be recognized by the search engine, the best technique to use is crawling.
Google discovers new web pages by using a web spider or Google bot to discover new pages.
For your page to be crawled,
1. You must have an XML sitemap with your site’s URL that you will submit on the Google search console.
The Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to create an XML sitemap.
2. There must be internal and external links pointing to the page you want to be indexed.
Basically, web crawling is the process whereby search engines like Google make use of a crawler, or spider, or bot to search out web pages.
Or content of the website on the internet with the sole aim of indexing them, so that they can appear on search engine results.
What is indexing?
Search engines store up a database of all content so as to provide a quick response to searchers’ queries.
For example, if an internet user performs a search, search engines display highly relevant content from their index with the hope of solving the searcher’s query.
Indexing is the process whereby search engines process and store every web page in a huge database.
Such that when searchers perform a search, search engines display highly relevant content pertaining to the searcher’s query from their index.
When you search for something on Google, what you are simply doing is asking Google to return all relevant pages on their index.
However, it’s important to know that indexing is different from ranking, a page that was indexed does not mean that the page will rank.
There are several factors that constitute the ranking of a page.
Like, website speed is one of the main ranking factors according to google.
To increase the website loading speed, you have to do some quick changes
- Switch from shared host to cloud host (Cloudways).
- Switch from a bloated theme to well coded, optimized and speedy theme (Themify Ultra).
- Start using cache plugins to minimize your codes.
- Optimizing your database.
- Connecting Cloudflare CDN.
We wouldn’t like to dive into that right now, but for more details on ranking, you can read our article on SEO.
What is the importance of website crawling and indexing?
If you want to be visible on search engine results, crawling and indexing are paramount.
For example, if your site has neither been crawled nor indexed, visibility online is impossible.
What crawling and indexing do is make your site visible on SERPs.
However, it is important to know that if you make an update on a page, you will have to index it again.
So that the changes made can reflect quickly on search engine results.
How to know if your site has been indexed?
Most importantly, checking if your site is indexed is quite necessary because it is a major prerequisite for you to rank on search engines.
To check if your site is indexed and crawled, simply head to Google and type ‘site:yourdomain.com’ in the search bar.
This query will display the number of pages that have been indexed on your site and how they show up on SERPs.
Another way to go about this is to sign up on the Google search console, if you are already a user, simply navigate to the index section on GSC.
The coverage report gives a more accurate insight into the index pages of your site.
You can also use the search console to check if a specific page on your site is indexed by pasting the URL on the URL inspection tool of GSC.
If the page is indexed, you will receive the response “URL is on Google”, if otherwise, it will say “URL is not on Google”
How to index a website quickly on Google?
Now that you have learned about the importance of page index, let’s take a look at a few steps you can take to ensure that your site is indexed quickly.
1. Create sitemaps and submit them to search engines
One of the fastest ways to get your site indexed is to create and submit your sitemap to search engines.
A sitemap is a group of files written in XML that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all your site’s content.
A good sitemap serves as a road map to search engines.
By creating an XML sitemap, you are giving the search engine the go-ahead to discover, crawl, and index pages on your site to enhance visibility.
To create and submit your sitemap, the Yoast SEO plugin is a good fit for that.
The plugin comes with a feature that allows you to easily create an XML sitemap
Just click on the Yoast SEO icon on your WP admin dashboard. after that, click on the dashboard option.
On the dashboard, click on the feature tab. On this tab, you will find the XML sitemap. Toggle the button to be sure it is on.
Finally, click on ‘save changes.
To submit your sitemap, kindly sign in to Google Search Console, and select your website from the sidebar.
Click on the sitemap option in the index section.
Type ‘sitemap_index.xml’ in the add a new sitemap section.
Click on submit.
However, if you have not verified your account on GSC, simply follow the procedure below:
Visit the Google search console website.
Click on the “start now” button.
Sign up with your email address.
You will be asked to select property type, You will have to choose either your domain or a URL prefix, I choose the URL prefix.
You can choose whatever you want.
The Basic difference between domain and URL prefix property,
At domain property, Google will display all your domain and subdomains performance in one tab. (https, www, http all in one tab)
At URL prefix, google will display only your submitted URL performance.
Next, type in the URL of your domain in the “Enter URL” section beneath the URL prefix option.
Wait for a few seconds for GSC to verify your property.
Next, you need to verify ownership and there are a variety of options to choose from.
You can choose to upload an HTML file, add an HTML tag to your site’s homepage, and much more.
I choose the “HTML tag” option. After pasting the tag on the home page of my site, I navigate back to the Google search console, to click on verify.
Once your site is verified, you will see taken to the homepage of the console.
Click on ‘add property’ to include your site’s URL other than this.
Like you can add https, www and http formats to check performance separately.
Finally, follow the procedure I mentioned earlier to include your sitemap on the console.
Often, the reason why Google can’t index your site is that it can’t be crawled.
This might be because your internal links might have a ‘rel=’no follow’ tag.
Search engines will ignore any link with a ‘rel=’no follow’ tag.
To solve this, all you need to do is to check your internal links to remove the no-follow tags.
3. Create a Robot.txt
For beginners who do not have a clue about what robot.txt is.
Robot.txt is a file on your site that tells the search engines what content/pages should or should not be indexed.
It is a command option that tells the crawler where to and where not to visit your site.
Your robot.txt file must by default give Google the permission to crawl your site.
But if there are sections you wouldn’t want to be crawled and indexed, it is best you include that in your robot.txt setup.
How to create a robot.txt file?
Before creating a robot.txt file, visit your FTP to be sure that you don’t have a robot.txt file stored in the root folder of your domain.
To create a robot.txt file, make sure you use a plain text editor.
For example, a notepad or Microsoft word.
Choose txt as the file extension on MS word and also choose the plain text.
To start with:
- Set the user agent term: Type the ‘user-agent:*’
- Next, type ‘Disallow’
Do not type anything further.
Let’s say you do not want the search engine to have access to WP admin, your robot.txt file should be like this;
Click on ‘save’
After saving, upload your robot.txt file to the root directory of your site.
For example, the file should be uploaded at www.mydomain.com/robot.txt
4. Make sure there are no duplicate content or pages
Having duplicate content or pages on your site can cause crawling issues.
If Google identifies that some pages on your site have similar content, this might cause crawling issues.
Make sure you check your site for duplicate content, if found, remove them as fast as possible.
5. Create internal links
Search engines make use of HTML links to crawl pages on a website.
Make sure the most important pages on your site are linked to one another.
6. Build quality backlink
Since search engines make use of HTML links to crawl pages on your site, having a high-quality backlink on your site will boost indexing.
In addition to this, quality backlinks boost trust.
It gives Google the notion that your site is trustworthy for its users to read.
Getting quality backlinks from authoritative sites boosts your indexing.
However, there are tons of ways to build backlinks, like guest posting.
It’s quite possible that the reason why Google can’t index your site is that they are telling them not to.
No index tags tell Google to skip a page from the indexing process, as a result, your page will not be displayed on SERPs.
A no-index tag on a page won’t rank because it won’t be indexed.
To check for no index tags, simply navigate to the <head> section of your webpage, and look for the meta tag that contains no index.
If Google already crawled your site, you should see something like this.
Remove it, so that Google can crawl your site.
Another way to check your no index tag is to use the URL inspection tool on the Google search console.
Enter the URL of the web page, then look at indexing allowed beneath the coverage report.
If the URL contains a no-index tag, you should see something like crawled and currently not index due to the no-index tag.
We can’t really state the impact social media has on SEO.
But we know for a surety that social media is another way of letting people know that your site exists.
Once you have created new content, copy the link, login into your social media account, and paste the link.
Voila! Your content is sent to the world.
Social media is another way of driving traffic to your site, if you have not implemented that as a part of your publishing strategy, you should Now.
Wrapping Up
We hope you learned how to index a website fast on Google via this guide.
Remember that indexing and crawling are two techniques you must adopt so that your site can be visible online.
For search engines to crawl and index your site, you need to submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
If you are looking for ways to create an XML sitemap, the Yoast SEO plugin is the best fit for you.
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