Indexing is an organized process to get your web pages added to Google & other search engines. A search engine after crawling your website will index all the relevant information & store it in a database.
Through this database search engines can respond to the user’s query. Search engines regularly update their index. If your website isn’t indexed, then it won’t show up in search engine results and the user might not be able to find your website on the search engine.
Do you recall those days before the internet came into existence when we had to consult an encyclopedia to learn about the world & dig information through the Yellow Pages when finding an electrician? Even in the early days of the web, before search engines, we had to search through directories to retrieve information. What a time-taking process it was & how did we ever have the patience?
Thanks to the search engines for revolutionizing the information retrieval process to the extent that users expect straightaway responses to their search queries.
Think of indexing websites in search engines the same as indexing books in a library. Websites, webpages need to be crawled & discovered, then only it can be indexed & referenced for relevant users.
Whenever users enter search queries, it is the index that provides the result for search queries within a second. Without an index, it won’t be possible for a search engine to display search results so promptly.
Indexing is the most important activity to get the website ranked in the search engine as the search engine bots store the publicly available web pages. Without proper indexing, the search engine would take more amount of time & effort each time a search query is initiated.
Sometimes you might find your web page isn’t indexed. This might be due to technical issues, malware, bad site signals, bad user experience, duplicative content, etc.
Indexing takes place in the backend after the crawled data is processed. The process of indexing is interlinked with crawling (the process of collecting useful information on your website). Once crawling is done the search engine organizes information before a search query to enable prompt response to query then only it will display relevant pages.
How do search engines index the web pages, links & websites?
Indexing can be a challenge for very large sites as search engines have a limited amount of crawl equity & resources but most sites shouldn’t have much trouble getting their content indexed.
The Google search index contains billions of web pages in its database. It also maintains a supplemental index, which is a secondary database containing a page of lesser importance but it’s unlikely to show unless we force Google to show them.
Depending upon which Meta tag you used i.e. index or No-index, Google will crawl & index your pages. A no-index tag means that the page will not be added to the web search’s index. By default, every WordPress post & page is indexed.
Letting only the vital parts of your blog/website indexed will help you rank higher in search engines. Unnecessary archives like tags, categories, and other useless pages must not be indexed.
The best way of indexing in search engines is to sign up for their webmaster tools. For this purpose, Google has Google Search Console (GSC) where it will report the number of pages indexed & you can find here the valuable crawl stats.
A sitemap is also a good option for getting a fast index by search engine crawlers. Just create an XML sitemap of the website & submit it to Google Webmaster Tool or Google Search Console to see how many pages you submitted are indexed.
Another way to get your page indexed is through log analysis. Log files show you whether web pages were indexed or not. It provides a detailed picture of the Google bot’s action on each page of your website.
Apart from these other factors which help search engines in the indexing web page, link & website are-
- Good quality content
- Disabling “Disable Search Engines in WordPress”.
- Setting up robots.txt correctly
- Sharing your website on Social Media like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Checking for crawl errors
- Set your preferred domain