Check if your site is indexed by Search Engines

So you’ve created a new website. Now you probably want to check if your site is indexed by search engines. Checking if your site is indexed is super easy. But before we get to that. What does it mean to have your website indexed anyway?

Click here if you want to jump to the instructions on how to check if you site is index by search engines.

What does crawling and indexing mean?

In order to understand what search indexing is, let’s first look at how Google gathers information about a website.

Crawling

The number of pages that exist on the internet is humongous and a central registry of all web pages does not exist. Consequently, Google and other search engines must constantly search the internet to find new pages and then add them to their list of known pages. This process of discovering new web pages is called crawling.

Crawling is the process by which a “Googlebot” discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. A huge set of computers are used to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called a Googlebot. It is also known as a robot, bot, or spider

– Google Support

Some pages are already known to search engines because they have already been crawled. Other times a search engine finds a new page by following a link from a known page. Thus the importance of having back links.

Another way that pages are discovered is through something called a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of pages contained in a domain. A sitemap makes it easier for a search engine to crawl a website. An easy way to create a site map is to use a plugin such as All In One SEO.

Indexing

Once a search engine has discovered a page, it tries to understand what the page is about. This process of understanding what the page is about is called indexing. The search engine will analyze everything on your pages. It creates a catalog of the contents of the page. This includes images and videos. This information is stored in something called an index, a giant database. All this information is stored in computers. When I say computers, I’m talking a ton of computers.

The amount of pages that are indexed by Google is in excess of 100 trillion pages. To have an index that runs smoothly would take over 500 million machines.

How to improve your indexing:

• Create short, meaningful page titles.
• Use page headings that convey the subject of the page.
• Use text as the bulk of your content rather a bunch of images whenever possible.

Your pages ranking

When a person searches for something on Google, it tries to find the most relevant answer from the index. This is based on a number of things. Google will try to find best answer to the search. This is done by considering things such as the location, language and the device that the person making the search is using. A searching for “best burger shop” in Canada would get a different result than a person searching the same thing in London.

How to improve your ranking

• Make sure your page loads fast and is mobile friendly.
• Have quality content on you site and be sure to keep it up to date.
• Familiarize yourself with the Google Webmaster Guidelines. This helps ensure a good user experience.

This probably seems like a lot of information to take in. I know it was for me when I created my first web site. You can make things a lot easier for yourself by using a plugin such as All In One SEO.

Is your site indexed

The results will show all of the pages from your site that have been indexed.  If your pages don’t appear, it means that your site has not been indexed yet.  But not to worry, just be patient.  It can take up to 3 months for your site to be crawled by search engines.  You can help search engines crawl and index your web site by submitting a sitemap.  I can’t over emphasize the importance of using an SEO plugin that does this for you.  If you don’t already have an SEO plugin, try All In One SEO.