Indexing your website or webpage on Google means that it’s discoverable in search engine results.
Whether you’ve just launched a new site or made updates, getting Google to notice your content is key to driving traffic.
Here’s a short, step-by-step guide on how to index your page on Google.
Caveat: Google Search Console
Before you can start the process of indexing your page on Google, you’ll need to have Google Search Console.
This free tool allows you to submit your pages for indexing, monitor your SEO performance, and identify issues that could be affecting your visibility. Once you’re set up with Search Console, follow these steps to ensure your page gets indexed and shows up in Google search results.
1. Make sure you have submitted a sitemap
First things first, make sure you have a sitemap submitted in Google Search Console.
The sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, that search engines like Google use to see a list of pages on your website. Submitting a sitemap to Google is highly beneficial because it:
- Helps Google find all your pages automatically: It ensures Google is aware of all your URLs, even those that might be harder to discover through regular crawling, such as deep or newly created pages.
- Improves crawling efficiency: By giving Google a structured overview of your site, a sitemap helps search engines crawl it more efficiently, speeding up the indexing process.
- Highlights updates: If your sitemap is updated regularly, Google will know when you’ve added new content or made changes to existing pages.
To submit a sitemap:
- Find your Sitemap: depending on how your website is built depends on how the URL for your sitemap. For websites built in popular website builders like Wix and Squarespace, and Shopify they are usually automatically generated for you. For WordPress, it’s likely you’ll need to install a plugin such as RankMath*.
- Go to the “Sitemaps” section in Google Search Console.
- Enter the URL of your sitemap (usually found at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
- Click “Submit.”
2. Check if your page is indexed
Before taking further action, check if Google has already indexed your page.
Go to Google Search Console, and enter the full URL into the search bar.
Here you can find out if Google is indexing your page, and if it isn’t, find out why.
By ensuring Google has access to this roadmap, your site’s pages can be indexed more quickly and completely.
3. Common reasons your page is not indexing
In the URL inspector, Google will tell you the reason why your page may not be indexed.
- You’ve only just published your page or blog: Google takes a little while to catch up with website updares
- Your page is marked at “no index”: this means you need to change this in your web builder to make sure Google knows it can pick up the page
- Your page is not found 404: The URL you have checked does not exist
- Redirect: The URL you have is being redirected to a different URL
4. Submit your page for indexing
If you are confident you have fixed any errors preventing your page from being indexed by Google, you can go ahead and Request Indexing.
Simply hit the “Request Indexing” button
Please note, this can take a little while for Google to process. I always recommend checking back in 24 hours.
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