Getting your website classified in Google index is possibly the first and foremost goal of any up-and-coming business website. Digital marketers also use different tactics and methods to get it done ASAP. While there are many ways marketers can opt in their quest of how to get ranked on Google, but it is also the responsibility of key individuals in an organisation to understand the ranking process, so they can expect realistic results.
Let us discuss a few of them:
How Google Indexing Works
Google index can be compared to a massive library that is larger than all the physical and virtual libraries in the world combined. And the index contains billions and billions of website pages and information. Now it’s Goggle’s job to pick up and show the most relevant ones according to the search queries. In such a humongous pool of information, Google has to constantly search and identify for the new content along with the deleted one to keep the library updated. And in all this hotchpotch, businesses with a new website have to index their website into Google index to make it appear in search queries.
Moving forward to the problems that businesses and marketers face when trying to earn their place in Google index in 2020; we can see that there are some methods that everyone can use to make your website more ‘searchable’ and speed up the indexing process. Here’s a detailed overview of Google indexing factors 2020.
1. Create and Submit a Sitemap
Creating an XML sitemap can be effective to get your website indexed fast. To better understand this factor, managers have to know that a sitemap is a list of all the important pages on your website written in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format for making it easier for search engines to find and understand them.
A sitemap helps search engine bots and algorithms navigate through your website easily. This way, they can discover new content and start indexing website pages. It improves your overall visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing and ranks new pages without any backlinks. The best part of creating a sitemap is that Google offers sitemap submission facility in which businesses can manually submit their sitemaps that speeds up the indexing process and increases the probability of appearing in search engine results.
2. Remove ‘Nofollow’ Tags
There are also times when Google bots cannot crawl through your website pages and it becomes a cause for the delay in indexing. This happens because your website pages have internal links containing a “rel= nofollow” tag. This tag doesn’t allow search engine bots to crawl through and in turn, your page doesn’t get indexed.
Hence, Google servers do not receive any indexing data about the page and that page doesn’t appear in search results. The best and quite simple way to tackle this issue is to check your internal links for ‘nofollow’ tags. Once you remove these, Google bots can easily follow the link and discover the content on the webpage.
3. Misplaced NOINDEX Tags
NOINDEX tags are a big reason that restricts the indexing process. This is like, you yourself are not allowing Google to index your website pages. As a result, it won’t store the page on Google database or show on the search engine results. Therefore, if any page on your site has a misplaced NOINDEX tag, it will prevent it from indexing and 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 look for the meta tag containing NOINDEX.
4. Don’t Forget to Check for Robots.txt File
After NOINDEX, you have to check for the robots.txt file. This robots.txt file tells Google bots where they can go and where they can’t go on the website. You just have to add robots.txt at the end of your website URL and you can see if it exists or not. If the code exists, you have to delete it so that Google bots can crawl and indexing can start from now on.
Google indexing seems quite a basic thing to most businesses and marketers, but it is not. Marketers have to be prepared for issues that are a result of mere ignorance or human errors and tackle those as soon as possible to get the website indexed and appear in search engine results as soon as they can. Online Presenceis the best SEO company in Australia that believes in maintaining transparency in processes and communication, cultivating long–lasting relationships, speedy communication, discipline in commitment and a solution-focused attitude.