Indexing and its relationship to search engine optimization

When you own a website or an online store, there is a great need to ensure that the website pages can be indexed in search engines such as Google, which is considered one of the most important engines that people use to find the various information they need.

So today I present to you a guide about indexing and its importance, in addition to clarifying the following:

• How to check to see if your page is indexed.
• How is your site indexed or archived in the Google search engine?
• When are your website pages removed from search engines?
• The time it takes search engines to discover and archive pages.

What is the basis for a site to appear in search engines?

The appearance of a website in search engines depends on three elements: “Crawling - Indexing - Ranking.” 

1. Crawling 

Search spiders, or what is known as “Googlebot,” crawl your website to see if your site deserves to be indexed or not. 

It is always crawling website pages to learn about them, and following the links within these pages until it finds new content.

2. Indexing

After search spiders crawl to discover the site's pages and measure their importance, these spiders begin indexing until they add your site to the search engine database, or what is known as the index in the Google search engine.

3. Ranking

After the site appears in search engines, we find that it obtains a ranking on one of the SERP pages. Once this ranking is obtained, the person responsible for improving the site begins to direct his attention to improving its ranking in search results, which is an important step.

The content of your site appears in the user’s search engine index (SERP) based on several factors…

Such as (ease of use, compatibility of the site with all devices, speed of site response, presence of valuable content) and other points that make Google prefer your site and improve its ranking in the search results pages of the SERP.

But What is the detailed concept of indexing?؟

The concept of indexing refers to search spiders discovering the pages of your site, and then starting to measure the quality of these pages until they appear in the results of searches.

This means that indexing means storing the site in Google databases and does not mean that the site appears in the first results of the SERPs.

If Google does not index your website, your pages will not appear in search engine results.

Why is website indexing important?

Indexing the site is an important factor to improve the ranking and bring more traffic, and we find that websites that are not indexed are not in the Google database. Hence the search engine cannot present these websites in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How is websites indexed?

Whether you own a website or store or work in online marketing, you must know how to archive or index your site efficiently and quickly. Here is how to achieve this:

Optimize your site's Robots.txt file

Robots.txt files are files that search spiders or Googlebot recognize as an indicator to crawl your website pages, and thus they are the catalyst for archiving your website pages in search results pages.

Make sure all your site's SEO tags are correct

SEO tags are another way to direct search engine spiders like Googlebot to your site's pages. 

There are also two main types of SEO tags that you should improve, which are (Rogue no index tags and canonical tags).

First, Rogue no index tags:

No index tags are what tell search engines not to index the pages you are on, so if certain pages are not indexed, you should know that they contain no index tags.

These signs can also be verified through two methods:

1. Meta tags:

You can check which pages on your site contain no index meta tags by looking for “no index page” warnings. 

If a page is marked as no index, remove the meta tag so it can be indexed again.

2. The X-Robots-Tag: 

In this case, you can use Google Search Console to find out which pages contain the X-Robots-Tag in their HTML code. 

• By using the URL inspection tool located at the top of your site in Webmaster Tools.
• Enter the page link and press Enter.
•  After entering the page, look for the answer to the question “Is indexing allowed?”

 If you see the words “noindex detected” in the http code of “X‑Robots-Tag,” you should know that there is an X-Robots-Tag that needs to be removed for this page to be archived.

Secondly, the Canonical tags:

Canonical tags are the tags that crawling spiders recognize. In the event that a specific page is preferred that does not have a canonical tag, Googlebot spiders recognize it as the preferred page and the only version of that page and index it.

But if a page contains a canonical tag, Googlebot crawlers assume that there is an alternative preferred version of that page and will not index that page.

So if you want to check you can use the Google Search Console URL Inspection tool to check for canonical tags, but in this case you will see a warning that says “Alternate page with canonical tag.”

Ensure the internal link structure of your site

Internal linking helps crawlers discover your site's pages, and pages that are not internally linked to each other are known as “poor pages” and are rarely indexed.

The link structure of your site is also ensured, as the appropriate site structure ensures speed in archiving. Ensuring the correctness of the internal link and the mechanism of the site map is essential, as the XML site map identifies all the content on your website, allowing you to identify unlinked pages.

You can also link internally between pages through the following methods:

• Add internal links related to the page's topic.
• Target internal linking on high-ranking pages to new pages.

Pay attention to writing high-quality content

High-quality content is one of the most important things that can help sites archive and rank. You can ensure your site's content is high-quality, and update low-quality, poor-value pages.

This is because search spiders or Googlebot focus on the most valuable pages on your website, so the content must be unique and of high value to the user.

How long does it take Google to index a site?

It may take Google a few days or a few weeks to index your site, but don't get discouraged. There are steps you can take for more efficient indexing.

The easiest way to index sites on Google is to request indexing through Google Search Console...

To do this, do the following steps:

• Go to the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console. 
• Paste the URL you want to archive into the search bar.
• Wait for Google to verify the URL. 
• If the URL is not indexed, click the “Request Indexing” button.

How do you check if a site is indexed?

Adding your site to the Google search engine is easy and you can check the indexing as follows:

• Go to Google search engine.
• In the Google search bar, type “Site:domain.com.”
• When you look below the search bar, you will see Google results pages “All”, “Photos”, “News”, etc. 
• Just below these items you will see an estimated number of site pages that Google has indexed. If no results appear, the page will not be indexed.

For example: 

Check Amazon website pages:

• write (site:https://www.amazon.com) in the Google search engine.
• You will then see all Amazon pages in the search result.

When are web pages removed from search engine indexes?

Your website pages can be removed from search engine indexes for several reasons, such as: 

1- Errors

If search spiders discover a link to a specific page with a “Not Found” or (404) error, or pages that do not respond due to hosting server errors or 5XX errors.

2- Add the No index tag 

When adding a tag or the No Index Tag, it can sometimes harm the site, especially if this tag previously brought visits to the site and is already archived in Google. When you tell the search engine to ignore this page and not index it, it will actually be removed from search engines.

3- Exposure to Google penalties

If there is a deviation from the standards assigned by Search Engine Management, your website or the offending page will be penalized and then removed from the search engine index.

4- Prevent search spiders from accessing a specific page

If search spiders cannot access a specific page, such as pages requesting a password or pages to fill out requests, they will ignore them and remove them from search engines.

Thus, we have finished talking to you about archiving or indexing and its relationship to search engine optimization, and you can also learn many answers to questions related to search engine optimization.

If you have a website and want to improve its indexing in search engines to double its visits Contact us.