8 Tips to index your site faster on Google

index site faster

You have just published a new article on your blog or a new page on your website and you have done all the optimizations necessary to improve your natural referencing.

Yes, but here it is: all these efforts will be invisible if Google does not index your content in its database!

How do you know if your new site, or content, will take an hour or a week to show up in search results? How to reduce the time between publishing and indexing your new URL?

We know that having content indexed by Google can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take for more effective indexing. We will see how to speed up the process below. 

1. Request indexing from Google

The easiest way to get your site indexed is to request it through the Google Search Console.

To do this, go to the URL inspection tool and paste the URL you want to be indexed into the search bar. Wait for Google to verify the URL: if it is not indexed, click on the “Request indexing” button.

As mentioned in the introduction, if your site is new, it will not be indexed overnight. Also, if your site is not properly configured to allow Googlebot to crawl it, it may not be indexed at all. Let’s go on!

2. Optimize the Robots.txt file

The Robots.txt file is a file that Googlebot recognizes as a guideline about what it should or should not crawl. Other search engine robots like Bing and Yahoo also recognize Robots.txt files.

You can use Robots.txt files to help crawlers prioritize the most important pages, so they do not overload your own site with requests.

Also, check that the pages you want to index are not marked as non-indexable. By the way, that is our next point on the checklist.

3. Noindex Tags

If some of your pages are not indexed, it may be because they have “noindex” tags.

These tags tell search engines not to index the pages. Check for the presence of these two types of tags:

Meta tags

You can check which pages on your website may have noindex tags by looking for “page noindex” warnings. If a page is marked as noindex, remove this tag and submit the URL to Google, to be indexed.

X-Robots beacons

Using Google’s Search Console, you can see which pages have an “X-Robots” tag in their HTML header.

Use the URL inspection tool: After entering a page, look for the answer to the question “Indexing allowed?” “.

If you see the words “No: ‘noindex’ detected in the ‘X-Robots-Tag'” you know there is something you need to remove.

4. Use a sitemap

Another fairly common technique to speed up Google indexing of your content is to use a sitemap.

It’s simply a file that allows you to give Google information about the pages, images, or videos on your website. It also allows you to tell the search engine the hierarchy between your pages, as well as the latest updates to take into account.

Using a sitemap can be particularly useful for Google indexing in the following cases:

  • Your site hosts many different pages and content: this ensures that Google does not forget.
  • You have not linked all your pages together: a site map allows you to indicate to Google the relationships between your different URLs, and to find possible orphan pages.
  • Your site is still too recent to have backlinks or incoming external links: this allows you to alert Google to the presence of your pages.

You can submit your sitemap to Search Console’s “SiteMap” tool and report its presence in your robots.txt file

Use a sitemap

5. Monitor Canonical Tags

Canonical tags tell crawlers whether a certain version of a page is preferred.

If a page does not have a canonical tag, Googlebot thinks that it is the preferred page and that it is the only version of this page: it will therefore index this page.

But if a page has a canonical tag, Googlebot assumes there’s another version of that page – and won’t index the page it is on, even if that other version does not exist! To review for canonical tags, use Google’s URL Inspection Tool.

6. Work on internal linking

Internal links help crawlers find your web pages. Your sitemap shows all of your website content, allowing you to identify pages that are not linked.

  • Unlinked pages, called “orphan pages” are rarely indexed.
  • Eliminate internal nofollow links. When Googlebot encounters nofollow tags, it signals Google to remove the tagged target link from its index.
  • Add internal links on your best pages. Bots discover new content as they crawl your website, and internal linking speeds up this process. Streamline indexing by using high-ranking pages to build internal links to your new pages.
Work on internal linking

7. External links

Google recognizes the importance of a page and places its trust in it when it is recommended by authoritative sites. Backlinks from these sites tell Google that a page should be indexed.

8. Share on social networks

Google also monitors social networks, and in particular Twitter, for which it seems very fast.

Sharing your new content on these social networks quickly brings Googlebot to your page. The faster it is crawled, the faster it will be indexed. 

If necessary, get help from SEO experts who will be able to identify areas for improvement, boost your SEO performance, and index your site faster.