What are Indexed Pages?
Indexed pages are website pages that have been successfully crawled by search engine bots. These pages have been indexed by the search bots, and this content has been closely analyzed. This means that the page now qualifies to appear on the search engine results page for user queries that are relevant to the content present on the page.
When a page is indexed, it has the chance to appear in the SERPs and, as a result, attract organic traffic.
How To Find Out if a Page Has Been Indexed by Google?
It is only after your page has been indexed by Google that it qualifies to appear on the SERPs. But how do you find out if your page has been indexed? Just follow the steps given below:
- Go to Google search
- In the search bar, type: search operator followed by your domain name (site:domainname.com) and press enter
- You will see an estimate of the pages that have been indexed by Google.
Google will show all the pages that have been indexed as results. However, if the result is zero, none of the pages on your website have been indexed.
But there is a problem with this method. Although it is a very straightforward and quick way to check your indexed pages, it is not very reliable. Hence, it is best to go through your Google Console account to get a detailed report of the number of pages that have been indexed on your site.
How To Get Google To Index Your Page?
If your website is new, don’t stress too much about indexing. The crawl bots are generally very efficient, and your pages will be indexed soon. On average, it takes a few weeks for the search bots to index a new site. But if you want to fast-pace the indexing, you can request Google.
Now, you may wonder how to request Google. Well, it is through your Google Console account. The GCS is an effective toolkit that allows you to request the search engine to crawl and index your page. Moreover, the platform also allows you to address any errors that are stopping the crawl bots from crawling through the pages on your website.
Let us go through a detailed explanation of how you can accelerate indexing:
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Add the Webpage to Your Sitemap:
Your XML sitemap is an important part of your website. All the URLs added on the sitemap are indexed by the search bots on a priority. Hence, make sure that the webpage that you want to be indexed has been added to the sitemap. After you have made your XML sitemap, submit it to Google Search Console.
Once you submit the sitemap, you can check the report at regular intervals to check the status of your website indexing process. In the sitemap, you can check whether the pages that you want to be indexed are crawled by the search bots. Along with this, you can also keep a tab of the pages that don’t add value to your website and whether removing them from the XML sitemap will be beneficial.
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Acquiring High-Quality Backlinks
If you thought that Google only indexes pages with the highest number of backlinks, you are wrong. However, Google perceives pages with high-quality backlinks as a vote of confidence and continuously indexes and reindexes them at regular intervals.
The more high-quality backlinks your website will have, the more valuable it will be in the eyes of Google. Hence, if you want a particular web page on your website to be indexed, ensure that it has some quality backlinks. Here, the word “high-quality” backlinks have been emphasized. In the quest to get a particular web page indexed, most website owners try to build a backlink profile that does more harm than good because the links are not from authoritative sites. So, when adding backlinks to your linking profile, pay attention to their authority and credibility.
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Block Poor Quality Web Pages:
Every website has a few poor-quality web pages added to its sitemap. The problem with having these pages added is that websites are allotted a limited crawl budget. This means that the crawl bots only crawl through a limited number of pages in one go. So, if you have poor-quality web pages added, the website crawl budget will be wasted. So, closely check the sitemap and remove the web pages that you don’t want to be indexed. You can do this through the Robot.txt file. Moreover, you can also use a 301 redirect when you know that the content doesn’t serve any value to the search engines or the user.
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Build Internal Links:
If your web page is still not getting noticed by the search engines for indexing, you can use internal linking. This technique is a sure-shot way of helping your page grab the attention of the search engines.
You can internally link the pillar pages of your website with the supporting pages to make sure the link equity passes to these pages. On the other hand, if one of your pages is performing really well in the SERPs, you can add an internal link to the page you want to get indexed. However, remember that contextual linking is very important in this practice. Internal links must be contextually relevant to enhance the user’s experience on your website.
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Constantly Monitoring Your Website for Technical Errors:
Making the webpages on your website easily available for Google indexing is not a one-time process. Just like any other SEO effort, you must constantly monitor the technical SEO of your website to ensure that the search bots continuously index and reindex your website.
The technical SEO of your website plays an important role. It helps your website achieve a high loading speed. When the loading speed is optimal, search bots take less time to crawl through each page, which means that more pages will be indexed in one go. In addition, the technical SEO of your website also reduces the problem of duplicated content. By adding canonical tags to your website, you guide the search bots to crawl through the preferred version of your webpage, making sure the indexing process is more efficient.
Conclusion
Now you know that having indexed pages on your website is very important. It is the foundation of building a website that ranks well on the search engines. A page that is indexed by the search bots qualifies to appear on the search engine results page.
But you don’t have to wait for the search bot to find your web pages and index them. There are some ways you can accelerate this process. You can update your XML sitemap, add internal links, ensure your technical SEO is performing at its best, and build a robust backlink profile. All these efforts help your page get noticed by the search engines and, as a result, help index it.