Google is the go-to place for most people looking for information, products, services, or even entertainment. If your business is not there, then you are missing countless opportunities.You may also be interested in:
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But, you are probably aware of all that and your site is already up and running. Now, you may be asking, how long will it take Google to index your site and get a better position in the search results?
We’re sorry to tell you that there is no definite answer to this question. It can take anywhere from a few days to six months to get new pages indexed. The main reason is that the search engine giant has to look at numerous factors to decide which website to index and rank at the top of Google’s search results.
In this article, we’re going to help you understand how Google crawls and indexes a web page and what you can do to speed up the process.
Understanding Google’s Indexing Process
Here’s a brief look at how your site is crawled and indexed by Google.
First, you need to make it easy for the search engine to find your site to crawl it and index it. Simply launching your site and creating some content will not be enough to get your website indexed. You also need to create XML sitemaps that help the search engine understand your site, build backlinks, and create high-quality content. That’s because most often Google finds new pages by following links or when the website owner submits a sitemap for Google to crawl.
Next, Google will start crawling your site and analyse text, non-text, and overall structure of the site to decide where it should appear in search results.
Once Google discovers and crawls a page, it will store the information in the Google index.
When a user types in a query, Google will try to find the most relevant answer from its index, looking at factors such as location, language, the device used, and so on.
How to Get Your Website Indexed by Google Faster?
First thing first: it’s important to note that none of these tactics will guarantee that your website will be indexed faster. Even Google itself reported that it cannot make predictions or guarantees about when a website will be crawled and indexed. But, there are a few things that you can do that can help the process along.
- Submit your site to Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools.)
- Focus on building quality backlinks. Not only that they help the search engines find new content, but also act as a vote of confidence.
- Build a solid internal link structure that makes it easy for Google to crawl your site and understand its hierarchy.
- Promote your content on social media. Although social media doesn’t affect your ranking directly, it certainly tells Google that your site is worth its attention.
- Create high-quality content regularly. Make sure that whenever you publish a new blog post, the content is optimised too – that includes the title and meta tags, alt attributes, and so on.
- Install Google Analytics and track your website’s performance to see what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Why Is My Website Still Not Indexed?
More often than not, the reason indexing your site takes so long is because it’s too new. It usually takes Google about a month to index a website with less than 500 pages, although that’s not written in stone.
If you think Google should have indexed your site by now, here’s a list of problems that might affect this process:
- The design of your website makes it hard to crawl it;
- You have a week internal link structure;
- You have no backlinks or spammy links;
- There was a crawl error (you can find them in the Search Console;)
Over to You
It takes quite some work to get Google to notice you and it can get overwhelming trying to figure out which strategies to use and how to implement them.
If you don’t know where to start, the experts at Australian Internet Advertising are here to help you. Get in touch now and find out what we can do for you.
