Date First Published: 22nd March 2023
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: SEO
Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 4/10
Learn about how to quickly get your pages indexed by Google in this article.
Sometimes, it can take a long time for your pages to get crawled and indexed by Google, especially if your site is new and has never been indexed by Google before. Google relies on links to find other pages, so the only way that a new site could get indexed is if another site adds an external link to it. Whilst it is not possible to force Google's crawlers to index a page, there are ways to get Google to index your pages more quickly that work. Below are 8 ways to speed up the process of getting your pages indexed by Google.
Orphaned pages have no hyperlinks pointing to them from any other page and they can only be found by typing and knowing the URL. These types of pages are difficult for Google to find and index, but they can be found through a sitemap file or external links to the orphaned pages. Make sure that all your pages have at least one hyperlink pointing to them to help Google discover and index your pages more quickly.
A robots.txt file is a text file used to instruct search engine bots on which URLs, URL patterns, and directories they can index. Make sure that the pages or the pages in the directory you want to be indexed by Google are not blocked by the robots.txt file. Whilst robots.txt files cannot completely keep pages out of Google's index if they are linked to by other websites, the search result will have no description.
The "noindex" tag instructs Google and other search engines to exclude the page from their index. If your page contains the "noindex" tag, then it will not appear in the Google search results. Make sure that the page you want to be indexed by Google does not contain this tag in the head of the HTML. If Google has already seen this tag, it might take some time for the page to appear in the search results as Google will have to recrawl the page to see that the tag is no longer there.
An XML sitemap is an XML file that provides search engines with a list of important pages, images, and videos of a website. This ensures that search engines can discover and crawl these pages more efficiently and is useful for discovering pages that are isolated from the rest of the content of the website.
It is not absolutely necessary to have an XML sitemap file. Google can crawl and discover most pages of your website as long as they are properly linked and not "orphaned". Listing URLs in a sitemap does not guarantee that Google will crawl and index that page, but it is beneficial to have a sitemap if your site has thousands of pages as Google might miss crawling some of the new or recently added pages. You can submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. It can take time for Google to index a page, so you should wait at least two weeks after submitting a sitemap before assuming that Google is having problems indexing your pages. For more information about XML sitemaps, see this article.
Submitting your pages to Google Search Console is useful for requesting Google to index a page and will quickly tell Google about a page, helping to get your page noticed more quickly than other methods. It is useful if you have updated a page and need Google to recrawl your page so that searchers can see the changes. As long as your page does not have any problems that are preventing it from being indexed, it should be indexed within a few days, but it does not guarantee that Google will index it. Google's systems prioritise high-quality and useful content.
It is unlikely that Google will crawl multiple pages on your website that are a copy of each other. Google does not want to show people different URLs that all have exactly the same content on the search results page and filters out duplicate content to prevent several identical search results from showing up. Usually, Google will automatically crawl the original page and ignore the others.
Google will rarely show multiple versions of the same content and is forced to automatically choose which version is the best result, based on factors, such as HTTPS and page quality. You can resolve duplicate content issues by adding the rel=“canonical” tag to the head of the HTML page if the same content is accessible from more than one URL to indicate the preferred URL, redirect the duplicates to the original page, or delete the duplicate pages. For more information about duplicate content, see this article.
A good internal linking structure will help Google to discover and index other pages on your website. Every page should contain internal links to other pages. No pages should create a dead-end, forcing users to hit the back button on their browser.
When providing a good internal linking structure, the click depth of internal links needs to be considered. The click depth is the total number of internal links a user must click through to access a page on a website. The homepage starts with a click depth of 0 and any subpages linked from the homepage have a click depth of 1. Ideally, the click depth should not be more than 3. A click depth of deeper than 3 may cause Google and other search engines to struggle to crawl the page. Pages over three clicks from the homepage are unlikely to be browsed by Google's crawlers. A high click depth will also lead to a poor user experience because users will have to spend a lot of time clicking through subpages to find the page they are looking for.
Building backlinks is a time-consuming process and backlinks from external sites are not something that you have control over, but it will help get your pages indexed by Google more quickly. Backlinks are one of the most important Google ranking factors.
Backlinks are not required for Google to index a page. There are millions of indexed pages with no backlinks. However, because backlinks are considered to be external votes of confidence by Google, Google's crawlers are more likely to recrawl pages with backlinks faster than pages without them.
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