Tips for Google Indexing to Boost Your Online Presence
The internet is filled with a vast volume of information. It is very easy for users to get confused with this information overload. This is why search engines were created in the first place to bring a semblance of order into this information chaos. Now, whenever a user types a query in the search bar of Google, a list of the most relevant results is presented in a neat way for them to sort through.
Before you start this process, you need to ensure you have a reliable internet connection. Contact MetroNet Espanol to get high-speed internet.
If Google doesn’t index and recognize your site, know that this will make you practically invisible in the organic results. So, follow the pointers mentioned below to have your site indexed by the top-performing search engine of the world, Google, thereby gaining visibility in its results.
Inspect Your Site’s ‘Indexed’ Status
Google might already be crawling your web pages and indexing your site, or it might not be doing that at all. How can you check the ‘indexed’ status of your site? There are two ways to do that.
Head over to Google and in the search bar type your website’s main domain or any specific page’s URL with the ‘site:’ operator. Hit search and see the number of pages that Google recognizes and indexes. If no results come up, this means that Google hasn’t indexed your site and you need to fix it.
Are you a Google Search Console user? Then, things become relatively easier for you. Simply open the Console, click on the ‘Index’ and check the extensive ‘Coverage’ report, which shows the number of valid pages with and without warnings. If there are zero issues, then Google has indexed some pages of your site; if not, then there are red alerts that you need to tackle. Another method is to copy-paste the URL in the ‘URL Inspection’ search bar, which will tell you right away if the page/site is indexed or not.
Reach Out to Google and Issue a Request
Creating a new webpage for your site or updating an old one necessitates that you inform Google about the change. This will then allow Google to adjust its algorithm to make your site more visible. How can you get Google to index the pages it hasn’t already crawled? By requesting, of course.
Open your Google Search Console profile (if you don’t already have one, it’s free to set up, and don’t even get me started on its benefits for a website owner). Next, go to ‘Index’ and then, ‘URL Inspection’. Paste the URL you’d like to get indexed, run the search, wait for Google to check the link, and then tap that ‘Request indexing’ button. It’s as simple as that.
Fix In-Site Problems That Prevent a Smooth ‘Indexing’
What’s stopping Google from automatically crawling and indexing your site and its pages? What are the underlying problems that are hurting your site’s organic visibility? How can you avert them and rank better than before? The following are a few of the in-site issues that you can check and address respectively:
Robots.txt Blocks—This standard is used by websites to communicate with web crawlers. If the robots.txt file shows a ‘disallow’ for all the pages or any specific page of your site, then it means that Googlebot can’t crawl them, and if it doesn’t crawl, it can’t fetch the pages back to Google index and can’t make your site visible in the result stream. So, fix the issue by removing the ‘disallow’ from the protocol for the pages you want to be indexed. Check the ‘Coverage’ report in the Console for better scanning and cleansing.
Unnecessary ‘noindex’ Tags—Sometimes, web owners like to keep a page or two private, which is why they apply the ‘noindex’ code in the meta tags, eg. <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>. This gives the Googlebot a signal to stay away. If all your pages have been unnecessarily tagged, then remove them and allow the bot to crawl and index.
Misplaced ‘Nofollow’ tags—When a ‘nofollow’ relational tag is applied to a page, the target links on that page are dropped from the graph of the web, which deters Google from crawling and indexing them. You can check this by running a site audit, correcting the misplaced rel=”nofollow” and making sure that all the right internal links are followed.
Summing Up
Creating a website is one thing. Ensuring that it gets adequate following is another. Hopefully, the tips mentioned here will help you get your website indexed on Google in an efficient manner. Once you are done indexing your website, it is time to entertain yourself. Sign-up for a MetroNet TV package to get the best home entertainment.