Overview:
You are invisible on google if your content on the website doesn’t index on Google. You don’t need to do any search queries and neither have you got any traffic on your website because you are invisible. So, in this article, I am going to tell you the 10 ways or you can say 10 steps that will help you to index your articles on google.
The twin pillars of most search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are Keywords and content but they are far from that which matters the most.
Accessibility refers to how visitors and search engines easily find your website it is less frequently discussed but is significant.
According to research, there are 1.93 billion websites available on the internet, and of those websites, there are 50 billion roughly pages. Imagine how tough for the google team or any human to explore these all pages of the website. So the bots of google that perform this role are called spiders.
The purpose of these bots is to determine the content of pages by following links from one website to another website and page to page. The information on these pages and websites is stored in a large database or index of URLs. After that those URLs will be put in the search engine algorithm to rank. The navigation process of these two steps is called crawling and indexing.
There are other common mistakes hurt your website’s SEO. Before implementing the steps you need to analyze those mistakes that are you doing that mistakes or not.
Professional SEO people will know and hear these crawling and indexing terms but I can define these terms for you who are not SEO persons.
What are Indexing, Crawling, and Google bot?
Indexing: A process of storing the website pages in a large database.
Crawling: A process in which we follow hyperlinks on the website in a large database.
Google Bot: Google introduces new website pages through crawling and after that, they add those pages to their index. The whole process is done by using the website spider which is also called a Google bot.
10 Ways to crawl and index your website easily.
No one can do anything in the world if the search engine google can’t find your website pages. You have to boost your website’s index ability and crawlability so google search spiders will find it.
We have covered the most important element of SEO which are indexing and crawling. Now, we discuss how these two processes affect your website and how to optimize your site through them.
- Submit your sitemap to Google
- Improve Loading of page speed
- Internal Linking Structure
- Site Audit
- Robot.txt Files Upgrade
- Check Your Canonicalization
- Remove Redirect chains and internal Redirect
- Fix Broken Links on the Website
- Check the content (Low Quality or Duplicate)
- IndexNow
1. Submit your sitemap to Google:
If you upload your content on the website and don’t even tell google but your content will index in the google search engine tats great. But that doesn’t mean your content will rank in google when you are waiting.
If you do some changes in your content and you want google to know that update immediately. You have to submit a sitemap to the google search console. The sitemap is another file that includes in your root directory. The purpose of a sitemap is to create a roadmap between search engines with direct links to every page on your website.
This is favorable for indexability because it tells google to know about different pages quickly. While on the other hand, the crawler has to follow the five internal links to create a deep page by submitting an XML sitemap. A crawler finds all of your pages on the website with a single visit to your sitemap file. If you have a great website of multiple pages and don’t have good internal linking then submitting your sitemap to google is a great step. Add
2. Improve Loading of page speed:
The google web spider doesn’t have time to wait for your page to load because he has to visit billion of pages in one day. If your site doesn’t load in a specific period then web spiders will leave your website and it is not good for your website and SEO.
Improve your page speed whenever you get the time and there are tools you can use to identify your website speed. The tool Screaming Frog analyzes website speed and it is available in the google search console.
If your website is running slow then you have to take steps to solve this problem. This will include your server upgrade issue, hosting platform, or your languages like CSS, Java, and HTML. The elimination and reduction of redirects are also a problem in loading speed.
3. Internal Linking Structure:
A good structure of internal linking is the key element of a successful SEO strategy. A website that is not organized well can be difficult for google’s search engine to crawl. These are not just my words I also mention the Google search advocate John Mueller’s words about internal linking.
He said, “Internal linking is a superior part of the overall SEO of a website. It is the great thing that you can do in any website to guide google and their visitors to the pages that you know are important”. Additionally,
If your internal linking on the website is not good then it is a risk for your pages and google because think about how they find the pages which have no link to another page or which are not part of your website. There is nothing directed to those pages and there is last option for search engines to find them is visiting your sitemap. If you want to get rid of this problem then make a logical internal structure for your website.
The homepage of your website should be linked to the subpages that are supported by the further pyramid. These subpages include contextual links where they feel natural. There is another thing that you keep in your mind is the broken links which include typos of URLs. It will lead you to a 404-page error and in other words page not found.
The main problem is that broken links will not be helpful and it is a disaster for your crawlability. You need to double-check your URL’s if your website is dead, in the migration stage, or if you change the structure. But make sure don’t do internal links with the old and deleted URLs.
4. Site Audit:
After those above steps, now you have to check whether your website is optimized for indexing and crawling or not. This will all be included in a site audit and it will start by checking the percentage of google pages which are indexed on your site.
How to Check Indexability Rate:
The number of pages in Google is divided by the number of pages available on your website is equal to the Indexability rate.
Open your google search console and here you can check that how many pages of your website are in the google index. You need to go to the pages tab and check this all by the CMS admin panel. There is a probability that there are a few pages on your site that you don’t want to index. The indexability rate won’t be 100% because of this but if your rate is less than 90% then there are issues you need to identify.
Reached your no-indexed URLs from the google search console and run the audit for them and it will help you to analyze the issue. There is another auditing tool in the search console which is URL inspection. It will allow you to see the google spider and you can compare it with the real pages to know what google didn’t generate.
New Publish pages in Audit:
Whenever you publish a new page on your website or update any important page you always make sure that the page is indexed or not. You can see this in the google search console because it will show you the all pages. Whenever you publish new pages to your website or update the pages which things are the most important? Make sure kindly they all are indexed or not and for that, you need to open the google search console where you will know which page is indexed or which is not.
If you still have issues then the audit will give insight into the other parts of SEO strategy which are short and it is a double win for you. You need to scale your audit process through different tools.
- Lumar
- Ziptie
- SEMrush
- Oncrawl
- Screaming Frog
5. Robot.txt Files Upgrade:
A robot.txt file is a plain text file that is available in your website’s root directory. 99% of websites that use this as a rule of thumb while are not required. The purpose of these files is to tell the search engine crawlers that how they crawl your website. The main purpose of this function is to manage the bot traffic on your website and keep safe your site from multiple requests which are overloaded.
A few common mistakes in robots.txt files include:
- The use of Wildcards is not good.
- There is no Sitemap URL.
- Nonindex in Robot text files
- Robot.txt files are not available in the root directory
- The scripts, stylesheets, and images are blocked on your site
6. Check Your Canonicalization:
Canonical tags attract consolidated signals from different URLs to one single canonical URL. This is a helpful way for telling google to index the pages that you want during skipping the duplicates and outdated versions.
But the disadvantage of this step is to open the door for the rogue canonical tags which connect to the older version of the page that didn’t exist. It will lead to the search engine indexing the pages which are wrong leaving your important pages invisible. To get rid of this problem, use the URL inspection tool to identify the rogue tags and then remove them from your site.
If you have a website that gains traffic from different countries then you have to build canonical tags in different languages. This will ensure that your pages are indexing in those languages which site you are using.
7. Remove Redirect chains and internal Redirect:
Redirect is a natural thing that allows the visitor to go from one page to another or a relevant page. They are common on most websites. But if you have mishandling them, you can inadvertently sabotage your indexing.
There are many mistakes you will do when making redirects but one of the main mistakes everyone does is redirecting the chain. The redirect chain creates when there is more than one redirect between the link you are clicking and the destination you want to go to. Google doesn’t take it to the positive signal.
In most cases, you may go to the redirect loop from where one page redirects to another page, which also directs to another page and the process will continue until it gets back to the reverse page. In short words, you have to create a loop that has no destination and that goes anywhere.
8. Fix Broken Links on the Website:
In simple words, broken links can harm the crawl ability of your website. You have to check regularly whether there is any broken link on your site or not. This will not hurt the SEO of your website but it will frustrate the users of your website.
There are multiple ways you can find any broken link in your website which include analyzing every link on your website like header, footer, in-text, navigation, etc. In Addition, you can also the google search console or Analytics to find 404 Page errors.
In the end when you find the broken links then you have three options. Update them, redirect them, and remove them.
9. Check the content (Low Quality or Duplicate):
If Google doesn’t provide your content to the viewer who searches for the title of your content then believe that you’re content will be not valuable to index. This content includes many grammar mistakes or spelling errors or maybe there are no internal or external linking in your content.
If you want to know about that mistake, go to the google search console where you will see which content of yours is not indexed. After that open the content and analyze whether it provides content that fulfills the reader’s needs. If not, then add some valuable content or update it.
Duplicate content is another reason why google bots are stuck while crawling your website. The reason of bot is stuck is that your structure of coding is confused and they don’t know which version to index or which not. A confused coding structure is caused by the session IDs, unnecessary content, and paging issues.
Sometimes, there is an alert for you in the google search console which told you that google is opposing more URLs than it should think. If you don’t receive that alert, go to the crawl result and search for things like duplicates or any missing tags. URLs with extra characters are maybe creating extra content for google bots. Fix that issues by correcting tags, adjusting google access, and removing the pages.
10. IndexNow:
This is a new protocol that allows the URLs to submit quickly between the google search engines through an API. It works very fast by submitting the XML sitemap and alerting the search engine that there is a new URL and also telling the changes to your website.
Maybe you are facing difficulty understanding it doesn’t worry I will tell you in simple words. The purpose of IndexNow is to give crawlers a roadmap to your website upfront. The crawlers will enter your website and get the information that they need and that is why there is no need to check the sitemap continuously.
It also allows you to inform the search engines about the non-200 status code pages which are unlike XML. If you want to implement it in your website then it is also easy. It will only need you to generate an API key in your host directory or another location. After that submit the URLs in the format which they recommend.
Conclusion:
The whole article consists of the 10 ways or 10 steps through which you can boost the indexability and crawlability of your website. Implement these steps and then analyze the content of your website which is not been indexed in the last few days will be indexed and the traffic of the website also increases.
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