9 Proven Ways to Get Google to Index Your Website Right Away

Are you getting zero organic traffic on your website? If yes, then it might possible that Google isn’t indexing your site.

When Google doesn’t index any webpage, it won’t appear in its search results. As a result, you won’t get any visitors from the search engine.

But there are several ways through which you can get Google to quicken the indexing process and start showing your site in SERPs.

In this article, we’ll show you proven ways to get Google to index your website right away. But first, let’s break down the basics of Google index…

What is Google Indexing and How Does it Work?

In simple words, indexing means adding a website and its pages to Google’s large database, so your site appears in its search results. Indexing is an important part of how Google search works.

First, Google finds new web pages through a process called crawling. It’s how Google discovers new content on your website by following different hyperlinks, which include inbound and outbound links.

Once it finds these pages, it then adds them to its vast database (indexes your pages).

With that, how do you know if your website is indexed on Google or not? Let’s find out…

How to Check If Google Has Indexed Your Site?

There are two easy ways you can use to find out whether Google has indexed your site or not.

First, you can simply perform a Google search of your website or a webpage and see if it appears in the search results. If it doesn’t, then it means your site hasn’t been indexed by the search engine.

And make your search more focused, you can use Google search operators. For instance, you can enter site:www.example.com if you want to look up your website.

Or you can enter the URL of your page along with the search operator to see if it’s indexed: site:www.example.com/your-web-page.

Besides that, you can also use Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tool) to check your pages’ index status.

In Google Search Console, enter the URL of your webpage in the URL inspection tool. If Google has indexed your page, you’ll see a message saying URL is on Google.

And if it’s not, then you’ll see URL is not on Google. That way you can find if your pages are indexed or not.

You can follow our tutorial on how to configure your WordPress site with Google Search Console to get started.

After checking the index status, what can you do to improve the indexing process of your website? Here are some quick ways to get your website indexed right away…

1. Create and Submit a Sitemap to Search Engines

One of the ways to help search engines index your website is by creating an XML sitemap.

A sitemap is a list of important pages on your website and is written in XML (extensible markup language) format so search engine crawlers can easily understand it. Here’s what it looks like:

By creating a sitemap, you’re helping search engine bots to navigate through your website, discover new content, and index your pages. It helps improve your search visibility and ranks new pages that don’t have any backlinks yet.

And the best part, Google offers an option to submit your sitemaps. This helps the search engine to quicken the indexing process for your site and show your pages on search results.

Here’s a simple guide on how to submit a website to search engines for more details.

2. Remove Nofollow Tags from Internal Links

At times, your webpages aren’t being indexed is because Google can’t crawl them. That’s because, if you have any internal links with a rel=“nofollow” tag, then search engine bots will not crawl the link and skip it during the crawling process.

As a result, no data is sent back to Google servers about your page for indexing and the page won’t appear on the search results. To overcome this issue, you should check your internal links and look for nofollow tags.

By removing the nofollow tags, you’ll allow the search engine to follow the link and discover the content on the webpage. To start, check the pages that aren’t indexing on Google, then move onto other pages on your website.

3. Delete Misplaced Noindex Tags

Another reason why Google might not be indexing your website is because you’re telling it not to.

Noindex tags tell Google to leave out a page from the indexing process. As a result, it won’t store the page on its database or show the page on its SERPs.

So, if any page on your site has a misplaced noindex tag, it will prevent it from ranking as Google won’t include it in its index.

To check for a noindex tag, go to the <head> section of your webpage and then look for the meta tag that contains noindex. Here’s what it should look like:

In the case of Google, the meta name will include googlebot and the tag will look something like this:

If you see this tag on your page, then simply remove it so Google can index the post.

Another way of finding noindex tags is by using Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool. Just enter the URL of your webpage and then look at Indexing allowed under the Coverage report.

If a noindex tag is added to the page, it should appear there, and you’ll see a message saying No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘X‑Robots-Tag’ http header.

4. Check Robots.txt File for Crawl Blocks

The next area to check why your site isn’t indexing is to look at the robots.txt file. A robots.txt file tells the search engine where they can go and where they can’t go on your website.

You can find the file for your website by entering robots.txt at the end of your site’s URL (example.com/robots.txt). Now look for the following piece of code and delete it.

That’s because this code blocks the search engine from crawling your website. And if it can’t crawl your site, it won’t index it.

Along with this, you can also look for any crawl blocks that might be stopping Google from indexing your site and then remove them.

For instance, the URL of your webpage shouldn’t be under disallow, especially for user-agent: googlebot. If it is, then remove it or the search engine will not include it during crawling and indexing.

To learn more, go through this detailed guide on how to optimize your WordPress robots.txt file for SEO.

5. Block or Redirect Low-Quality Pages

The quality of your pages also plays an important in how Google indexes your site.

If you have hundreds and thousands of posts but the majority of them don’t add value, then Google will eventually decrease the number of times your site gets crawled and indexed.

The reason for this decrease is because Google has a limited amount of server resources. If the crawler continuously finds low-quality pages, it will slow down the discovery of new content on your site.

To avoid this issue, you can set up 301 redirects for your low-quality pages and point them towards another high-quality page. Or you can simply remove them from your website.

This will not only boost your site’s indexing, but also improve its health.

6. Make Sure There is No Duplication of Pages

Having duplicate content can be another reason for slow or no indexing by Google. If a page is duplicated or has content that’s 99% similar to another page, Google is unlikely to index it.

So, make sure that there are no duplicate pages on your website. If there are, then it’s a good practice to remove them as quickly as possible since Google will see them as unworthy content.

7. Share Your Posts on Social Media

To improve your site’s indexing process, you should share new blog posts on social media. This sends a positive signal to Google and improves your chances of indexing.

For instance, a social media platform like Twitter is great for getting minute-by-minute news. Google regularly crawls Twitter and even shows a snippet in its search results.

If you just covered a trending topic and sent out a tweet about it with a URL to your blog, Google might crawl your tweet and shows it in the snippet on search results.

Because it crawled and indexed your tweet, it is possible that Google will also index your content immediately.

8. Get High-Quality Backlinks

Since Google crawler works by following links to your website, securing high-quality backlinks will help boost your indexing.

Backlinks provide a vote of confidence for your content and pages with high-quality backlinks will have more importance for Google than those without.

So, as you get links from authoritative websites, Google will see your site as trustworthy, and start to index your content more quickly.

There are tons of ways you can get quality backlinks, such as creating infographics, guest blogging, finding broken links, and more.

You can check out these 15 quick and simple ways to get backlinks.

9. Build Powerful Internal Links

Speaking links, another way of speeding up your site’s indexing process is by building powerful internal links.

Internal links help Google discover content on your website as it goes from link to link.

If you have a page on your website that doesn’t have any internal links, Google won’t be able to find other content on your site. As a result, it might take a lot of time to index other pages.

This is where you can add internal links to relevant places in your content. But you might wonder, what is a powerful internal link?

Well, there must be pages that get the most traffic on your site. These pages might be ranking well on Google and must be offering value to users. By internal linking your other pages from high traffic posts, you’re creating powerful internal links.

To easily find new linking opportunities on your site, you can use the All in One SEO plugin.

It will automatically crawl all of the pages of your site and provide you with a report of orphan pages (pages that have no links) and linking suggestions.

You can also check out this complete guide to SEO link building.

And there you have it!

If you’re having any trouble indexing your website on Google, then give anyone of these fixes a try.

With that, we hope you liked our article on ways to get Google to index your website right away. If you found this post useful, check out our post on WordPress event tracking and why your business needs Google Analytics starting right now.

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