Don’t Wait for Google to Index Your Page

If a blog post gets published on the internet, but no one is around to see it, does it even exist?

Chances are if your post isn’t getting any views because you’re waiting around for it to start appearing in Google, you’re going to feel like the answer is no.

Google doesn’t index your site every day or each time you update an item. Instead, the changes you make go into a queue. If you have a smaller website or if you’re a small business, you can expect to wait a while before those changes are visible.

It can take months after you publish a new blog post for Google to naturally find it, index it, and put it into their search results. Frustrating, right?

But what if we told you that there is a tool out there that can quickly index your website? That it’s like picking up the phone, calling Google and saying, “Hey, I published a new blog! Will you come and index my site?” This tool exists and it’s called Google Search Console.

Indexing Made Easy

Search Console allows you to easily request that Google index your site. After your request, Google will put your post or site into a much faster queue so that your new post can start getting views.

Each time you publish a post, head over to Google Search Console. Once you log in, you’re going to see a whole bunch of stats. Don’t let that overwhelm you. Instead, focus only on the URL Inspection tool.

The URL Inspection tool will highlight the little bar on the top of the screen. If you copy and paste your new blog post address in that bar, you’re going to discover that the URL is not on Google. That’s because you’ve searched for a brand new post. Google has no idea that you posted something new. Fear not. All you need to do is submit your request and Search Console will start the indexing process!

Get Your Index Game On

Requesting indexing is worth doing every time you publish a new page, update your homepage, make large updates, add or remove sections, or clean up your titles and meta descriptions. If you need to index a big set of pages, try to do a couple per day to get through your site.

As a fair warning, it may take Google a while to index especially if you have a huge set of URLs to do. However, you can also request an index of your entire site. If you’re launching a new website, or if you’ve made changes to a ton of pages, you can request the root-or home page-and Google will crawl all of the links associated with it. Once submitted, your site goes into the priority crawl queue.

We recommend that you make indexing a part of your process. Check out our blog publishing checklist and make sure that your blogs are on track to make it to the big leagues!

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Originally published at https://www.tresemergroup.com on May 9, 2019.