When it comes to building and growing an online presence, you must appear on Google. A website is not enough; rather, it is a must to ensure that the website is viewable by people who are actually searching for your products or services. But how do you determine if your site is indexed on Google? No worries if you are unsure—there is a simple way to check, and we will take you through step by step.
Imagine you have created a website showcasing your business, products, or blog after working really hard. You wrote some good articles, we made an attractive design, and our pages are friendly with the search engines. Now, when you type in your website name or the keyword, you discover that your site is not even indexed in Google. Isn’t it frustrating?
The problem may be that your website has no index in Google yet! Indexing what Google calls ‘Crawling’ involves Google’s spiders or bots visiting your website and storing your web pages in its database. When the page is mapped it goes online and becomes searchable. If your site is not indexed, no one is able to find time to visit your site.
In this article, we will go through how to determine if your website is indexed by Google and what you can do to ensure it gets added properly to Google’s search index. We will also introduce you to a tool that makes this much easier: an indexing checker tool.
Why is Google Indexing So Important?
If your site is not indexed then the site will not come under the search list of google. This means that sometimes people looking for your services or your products will never get to see your site even if the site is good. Techniques of indexing are the first ways to reach out for exposure on the World Wide Web.
As of now, Google processes billions of web pages per day and refreshes the index in real time, ensuring the search results are as good as possible. Using a Google index checker can help you verify if your site is properly indexed. Once your site gets indexed, it becomes part of the search engine’s database, which is very useful when users search for terms related to your content. Basically, indexing is what brings your site into the public realm.
How to Check If Your Website Is Indexed on Google
Now, you may be asking yourself: “How do I know if my site is indexed by Google?” The good news is that this is a pretty easy process, and there are a couple of ways you can go about it. Here’s how you can find out whether or not your website is indexed:
Method 1: Site Search on Google
The easiest way is to check via Google itself. You can get to Google’s search bar, type in what you want below:
site:yourdomain.com
Remember to change “yourdomain.com” into your actual website domain name. For example, if your website is called “mybusiness.com,” you’d search for the following:
site:mybusiness.com
This can be ascertained when Google produces a list of pages on your website; however, in case the search doesn’t result in anything, that would imply Google has yet to index your website.
Method 2: Utilizing Google Search Console
Google Search Console is free of cost by Google which can be accessed in order to track and ensure your website maintains the visibility level it should. It has an index status report and all details which you could obtain through steps: login with Google Search Console, and through the left sidebar on clicking “Index,” and subsequently on “Coverage.”
The coverage report will indicate how many pages are indexed on your site and whether there are specific pages that would be causing any problems.
More detailed information into your site performance on Google- this tool, therefore, serves to help point out any indexes that may seem problematic.
Why Your Website Might Not Be Indexed
There are various reasons why Google search might struggle to index your site, indexing issues being one of the common causes. Some of these reasons include:
New Website– New websites may take a little while for Google to crawl and to index their pages. Google does not index every website simultaneously and more so, when they are completely new.
Crawl Errors: Another reason your site is not indexed can result when trying to crawl a specific webpage. This may be due to the technical problems of an existing website, that is, broken links on your server can prevent the Googlebot from visiting your site.
Noindex Tags If you have used a “noindex” tag in the HTML code of your website, Google will not index your pages. Although this can be useful at times (such as when you do not want certain pages indexed and appearing in search results), it can inadvertently prevent Google from indexing your whole site.
Poor Site Structure: Should a website have a bad internal linking and structure it is possible that Google crawlers get lost and may not visit each and every page. Correct site architecture enhances how the Googlebot navigates your site and goes through all your pages.
Blocked by Robots.txt: With the robots.txt file, the crawlers of Google can be disallowed from indexing specific parts of your web site. In case you have a wrong setting of robots.txt you might find that Google cannot crawl or index your site.
How to Ensure Your Website Is Indexed by Google
If you have checked your website’s index status and found that it is not indexed or you want to speed up the process, there are several steps you can take to ensure your site gets indexed:
Submit Your Site to Google: The first step if you have a fresh site is to simply index your website on the Google Search Console. After signing in with the help of your Google account, you’ll have to prove you own the site as well as submit a sitemap that will let Google know what its structure is.
Create Quality Content:Google thrives with new, significant value-added content. It cares about most sites that are frequently updated with useful, well-written articles and blog posts related to the site’s topic. To achieve this, it’s essential to create quality content, which can include blogs, articles, product pages, landing pages, and virtually any similar content.
Use Internal Linking: Internal links are those links that point to other pages on your website. They help the crawlers of Google to find new pages. So, your website should be well-structured, and all the important pages should be linked throughout the website.
Fix Crawl Errors: Use Google Search Console to identify crawl errors and resolve them. This could involve fixing broken links, improving server response times, or adjusting any other technical issues that may be blocking Googlebot from accessing your site.
Optimization of Robots.txt file: Your site’s robots.txt file must be correctly configured in order to ensure that Google crawler can crawl your site and it gets indexed accordingly. You could use the Google Search Console “robots.txt Tester” to spot any problems there.
The work of Index Checker Tools
While you could go to Google and manually check your site’s index status, this can become more complex using an indexing checker tool. Using this tool provides the ease to easily see whether or not your website is indexed, identifies problems with your page, and track index status in a much detailed analysis.
An indexing checker tool typically scans your website and gives a status report. It can give you a basic idea whether your pages are indexed, whether errors are occurring, or if your site is properly optimized for search engines. These tools save you time and ensure you spot any issues in due time, preparing your site to be found by the users searching for your services.
Conclusion
This will make it more visible in today’s digital world to get your website indexed in Google, making it a basic first step for its visibility by possible visitors. You cannot possibly gain anything by allowing your site not to be indexed since users using search engines would be unable to view it. Through periodic checks of index status and subsequent optimization measures on your part, you ensure your website is well-prepared to be seen by the appropriate viewers.
With the use of tools like Google Search Console or an indexing checker tool, you will be able to track your site’s index status and solve issues for it to be visible on Google. Begin checking your site today and ensure it is indexed; then keep improving your online presence!