Table of contents
What is Indexability of a Website
Indexability is the concept that refers to the ability of a search engine to analyze and add a web page to its index of results. In short, indexing is the ease with which search engines find, browse and classify the contents of your website.
Why is it important for our website to be indexable
What we are looking for as webmasters, developers, or website owners is:
That Google, or any search engine, shows our URLs in as many queries as possible and as high as possible.
This is only possible if your website URLs are indexable. If your website is not indexable, it will never rank in the results of any search engine.
Indexing phases
- Discovery: The crawler of a search engine, in the case of Google will be Googlebot, discovers a web page through the sitemap of the website, external links, or when someone enters url in the search engine.
- Crawling: The crawler follows all the links on the page and crawls the related pages.
- Extraction: The crawler extracts all relevant information from the page, such as the title, content, keywords, and metadata.
- Processing: The information collected is processed and a score is assigned based on the relevance and quality of the content.
- Storage: The processed information is stored in a search engine index.
- Retrieval: When a user performs a search, the search engine searches its index and returns the most relevant results.
- Show results: The search results are displayed to the user in a list of links to the relevant pages.
Crawlability vs Indexability
Indexability and crawlability are not the same, although they are closely related terms.
The crawlability of a website actually refers to the ability of the search engine to access and crawl the content of a page while the indexability of a web page refers to the ability of the search engine to list and display this content in their search results.
How to Improve the Indexability of your Website
There are some measures you can take to facilitate the indexability of your website.
The most common are:
1. Submit a Sitemap File to Google
The XML Sitemap is a small file that contains a complete list of all the pages of your website linked and ready to be submitted to the search engine via Google Search Console.
It is the most direct method to get your website in Google’s index.
In addition, this file will notify the search engine of any automated updates.
2. Reduce Your Website Response Times
Search bots usually have a limited time to crawl and index a website.
This is known as the crawl budget. Once this time has elapsed, the spider leaves our page.
Therefore, if we are able to load all our pages fast, we maximize the amount of URLs that the Googlebot will be able to visit and we can even get it to crawl 100% of our site without exhausting the budget.
3. Avoiding Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is content that is replicated in more than one URL on our website.
Having duplicate, similar or irrelevant content is a waste of search engine resources and devalues the quality of your website.
If the percentage of this duplicate content is high, crawlers will reduce the frequency with which they visit your website because they will understand that it is not worth crawling the same content on different URLs.
This translates into less relevance and worse positions.
Therefore, inspect and fix any duplicate content issues on your site.
Pro tip:To identify this type of duplicate or similar content you can use a tool called Siteliner.
4. Contextualizing Internal Linking well
Strengthening your website’s internal linking helps increase the chances that the Googlebot will find or reach all of your content faster.
That’s why you should strive to improve inter-page linking and focus on ensuring that all relevant content is linked to.
This enhances navigation within the website, makes hierarchies clear and helps to distribute page authority to the most relevant sections of your website.
5. Simplifying Web Architecture
The information structure of the website plays a crucial role in its crawlability by impacting indexing.
If we define a complex architecture with too many depth levels, we will be forcing the Googlebot to navigate more than necessary to find the URLs we want to index.
Creating an unnecessary problem.
What to avoid if you want to be present on Google
It is just as important to facilitate the work of search engines as it is to avoid common mistakes that can damage the indexing of your project unnoticed.
We recommend that you pay close attention to:
- Possible Server Errors o Errors 500 or 400
- Unsupported technologies and scripts
- Looping redirects
- Misconfiguration of the robots.txt file
Avoiding these errors, such as unintentional blocks in the access code of web crawlers, is paramount.
Make sure you have regular check-ups to detect these errors and avoid major problems.
How Can I Check Google Indexing
The truth is that this is a very simple task.
To check if a URL or website is indexed you can use several methods.
The quickest way is to use the search command “site:domainname.com” and check the results returned by the search engine.
As you can see in the example image below:
Another way is to go to Google Search Console and use the url inspector.
And finally,
If we want to detect server errors to improve the indexation of our site, we can use a tool such as Screaming Frog or a free tool such as: rankwatch
This way we can generate an indexing report for our entire website in a matter of minutes.
In conclusion:
The indexability of a website is one of the most important points to take into account if we want to be present in search engine results.
This is a necessary but not sufficient condition to appear in their results.
Without indexed URLs it is impossible to appear in the results of any search engine.
Therefore, taking care of this technical point is key for your web positioning.
Links and recommended reading:
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Indexability?
The indexability of a website is one of the most important characteristics when it comes to appearing in search engine results. If you want to learn.
To enhance this quality on your website and make Google’s job easier, you need to have a thorough understanding of this concept.
Why isn't Google indexing my website?
If Google does not index some pages on your site, it is likely that it cannot crawl them. To identify these crawl errors go to Google Search Console → Select your site → Click on “Crawl” → Click on “Crawl errors”.
How long does it take Google to index a website?
It depends on the authority of your website, but you can force your site to be indexed by using the GSC url inspection tool and request a url to be indexed directly. The process can take a few minutes.
How to submit a website to Google's indexes?
Go to Google Search Console → Access the URL inspection tool → Copy and Paste the URL you want to index in the search bar → Wait for Google to check the URL → If the ok message comes up, click on the “Request indexing” button.