Everything to Know About Search Engine Indexing

There are many aspects of SEO and getting your website to rank on search engines, but one of the most basic steps is getting it indexed. Without indexing, your website and all of the content on it won’t appear under any keyword searches. Here is a quick breakdown of what indexing is and why it’s important.

 

What is Indexing?

You can think of indexing like cataloging. Essentially, a page is indexed by a search engine, like Google, if it has been visited by a crawler. This crawler analyzes the page for content and meaning, and stores this information in Google’s index, or database. Indexed pages then appear in SERP when users make queries.

 

How Long Does Indexing Take?

This question has a frustrating answer: it depends. However, Google has provided some insight into indexing timelines. According to Google, it can take “several hours to several weeks” for them to index new or updated content. If your website has technical issues this can take even longer.

 

However, most pages are indexed within a few hours or days in our experience. Google does prioritize more important sites like news sites and bigger ones, but that doesn’t mean they ignore local business sites. It may just take a little longer!

 

How to Speed Up Indexing

There are a few ways businesses can speed up indexing and start showing up under search results faster. Companies should invest in quality content that Google will think is worthy of indexing. There is so much information out on the Internet, so Google and other search engines don’t index it all. Make sure your pages are original, don’t contain duplicate content, and are worth reading.

 

You should also look at your page speed and architecture. The crawler has to move through your website, so if your site isn’t well laid out and isn’t easy to navigate the crawler will worker slower. Take the time to make your site user-friendly and link pages to increase indexing times!

 

Indexing & Rankings

Indexing and rankings go hand in hand. Without indexing, search engines wouldn’t know what keywords are relevant to your business. That’s why one of the first things any good SEO agency will do when launching a new or updated site is to get it indexed.

 

Having said that, indexing doesn’t guarantee rankings. Just because Google indexes a page doesn’t mean it will show up for your target keywords. That’s why indexing is only one part of SEO. Creating quality content, building links, optimizing technical SEO, and building brand authority are all important to increase rankings.

 

Interested in getting your business more online visibility? Contact Hilborn Digital today! We’re one of the top SEO agencies in the GTA and would be happy to discuss how our digital marketing services can grow your business.