After building a website or updating a page, your next goal is to make it accessible to your target audience.
And if you're aiming to earn as much organic traffic as possible, your content must appear and rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
But before your site starts ranking, the search engine must crawl + index it first. In web lingo, indexing is the process of adding your site and content to the search engine's database, from which search results are pulled.
So, how does website indexing work? To cut a long story short, the search engine discovers (or crawls) your site, analyzes it, and eventually adds it to its massive database.
In this article, we’ll explain how website indexing works as we simplify its technical details to make them digestible to beginners.
What does “indexing” a website mean?
A search engine's primary role is to provide relevant results for people’s queries. But, of course, search engines don’t create these results out of thin air. They extract them from various sites across the Internet and add them to their database.
This is what indexing is—the search engine’s process of adding websites and their content to its library for answering search queries.
When your site is indexed, the search engine analyzes your site’s content and relates it to every possible topic searched by users.
For instance, if you own a small e-commerce site and one of your products is an organic mouthwash, search engines might index your site so it would appear in users’ SERPs when they search for “best organic mouthwash.
How do search engines index websites?
Indexing is an automatic process performed by search engines. They employ web crawler software to constantly look for new sites and pages that must be added to their index.
Let’s see Google’s complete search engine indexing process.
The first step is called crawling, where Google uses its web crawling software, Googlebot, to fetch new pages that must be added to the index.
The Internet is a massive decentralized hub of sites and pages, so Googlebot has to “jump” across URLs to discover new pages for the index. Once the crawler discovers a new page, it will “crawl” to determine its content and prepare it for the second stage—indexing.
Once you submit a website to Google a page is crawled, Google will start analyzing the textual and media content of the newly discovered pages. Afterward, using several keywords present in the pages, Google will index the content and associate it with various searchable topics, allowing your pages to appear in SERPs. Therefore, it’s possible that your single page can be indexed for thousands of possible topics searched by users.
Other search engines index the same way as Google. For instance, the Bing search engine has Bingbot, a web crawler that looks for new and updated content and prepares it for indexation.
Wow long before search engine indexed my site?
There’s no definite timeframe for Google’s indexing process. However, a newly published page might take several days or weeks (or even months) before appearing in SERPs. Usually, new pages from authoritative sites with high domain authority are indexed faster compared to newly built websites.
Is it possible to get my website index faster?
There’s no surefire method to get Google or other search engines to crawl and index your site immediately upon their publishing. Your content’s fate highly depends on how fast the crawlers will visit your content.
Fortunately, we can “convince” Google to index our site faster. Well, not immediately after publishing, but at least not long enough that it would take months before Google discovers our URLs.
Here are some of our suggestions to get search engines to index your website faster:
- Submit an XML sitemap: A sitemap is a blueprint of your website, detailing its important pages and their relationships. When you submit a sitemap, you are inviting the crawlers to take a glimpse of your site’s structure and recrawl its content. You can submit a sitemap using Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Manually request indexing: Using the Google Search Console, you can request the Googlebot to index a URL that is not yet included in their index. To do this, use the GSC’s URL Inspection Tool and paste the page URL you want to request for indexing. Click “Request Indexing” to complete the process.
- Improve your website’s content and structure: This is basic SEO. Make sure that your content is informative and thorough. Check for potential duplicates (or even pages with similar subjects and slight differences) and, if possible, merge them into a single page. Your site must also follow a logical structure where pages are appropriately placed in categories (and subcategories) and easily navigable.
- Use an automatic indexing tool: An indexing tool can help you index URLs faster than the other methods we’ve suggested above. Many of these tools have crawlers and tested APIs to expedite the indexing process. Moreover, an indexing tool can help you regularly check for pages’ indexing status to quickly address URLs that Google might have deindexed. For example, our URL indexing tool works with the Google Search Console API and the Indexing API by Google.
Why don't search engines index a site?
It’s possible that a search engine might not continue indexing a site despite discovering it. Here are some common reasons why indexation might not push through:
- Technical issues: Broken links or coding issues can prevent Google from indexing the site.
- The site’s HTML has a “noindex” tag: It’s possible that the developer intentionally opted not to get his site indexed using the noindex tag. In this case, the site might contain sensitive information or not be for public viewing.
- Restrictions by the Robots.txt file: The robots.txt file instructs the search engine which URLs should be accessed. It’s possible that the owner incorrectly blocked some directories, which restricted Google from crawling them.
- Website navigation issues: Google might struggle to index a website if it is poorly designed with an incoherent or complicated structure.
- Content-related issues: Google also considers the quality of a site’s content to decide if it should be indexed. For instance, duplicate content or low-quality pages with thin content are typically not indexed as they’re deemed unhelpful to users.
What’s next after website indexing?
Once your pages are indexed, it’s time to continuously optimize them to improve their relevance and quality and reach the top spots of SERPs. At this point, you must be equipped with proper technical SEO knowledge, including link building, on-page optimization, UX optimization, and more.
Of course, don’t forget to track your site’s indexing status. Google might deindex your pages for whatever reason. You can use the Google Search Console to monitor this or rely on an automatic SEO tool.
Wrapping up
Search engines automatically crawl and index websites, so there’s not much effort required to get your site indexed. Unfortunately, this “automatic” indexing process might waste your precious time, especially if you have time-limited content or you’re looking for quick website visibility growth.
You can submit an XML sitemap or manually request URL indexing to encourage Google to visit your site faster. Yet, these methods do not guarantee that Google will promptly index your site.
But with INDEXED.pro, you can get your URLs indexed in less than 48 hours. Using Google Search Console, Indexing API, and other AI-powered tools, you can fast-track your request to have your content indexed by the Google search engine (and soon other search engines).
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