Are you looking for the best ways to increase your site’s crawling and indexability? Well then, your search ends here.
Google gives results based on the keywords we search. But do you know how it works?
There are more than billions of websites available on the internet. And Google crawls each of these websites to index their pages and show results accordingly.
On the contrary, by any chance, if Google fails to crawl your website appropriately, it will not get a proper index. This is why you must increase the crawling and indexability of your website to get a better result on SERP.
How To Increase Crawling And Indexability
Before we begin with the tips, you need to understand crawlability and indexability.
Crawlability refers to the ability of Google Bots to scan and index the pages of your website.
Indexability represents search engines like Google, Bing, and others’ ability to analyze and index webpages into their server.
1. Create Internal Linking
Internal links are essential to increase your site’s crawling and indexability. This means if your pages have more internal links, crawlers will index different pages more precisely. And if a page has no link, crawlers either stop scanning or crawl back to find other ways.
Hence, I’d suggest having an excellent strategy to create good internal linking. First, you must identify which pages you want to link together. However, always make sure to follow the relevance while making a hyperlink.
This way, you can help Google crawlers and visitors read and understand your website.
2. Create A Sitemap
It’s like a map that guides search crawlers to visit and scan your website’s pages. A sitemap is essential if you intend to index your site on Google. However, the sitemap is only for the search engine, not your audience.
According to Google, your website must require a sitemap if it comes under the following conditions.
- If the website is really large
- If it has many achieved pages not properly interlinked
- If your website is new and has a few external links
- If the website contains rich content (Video, Picture, etc.) or is visible on Google News
Some popular CMS like WordPress automatically creates an XML sitemap. However, making your sitemap isn’t enough. It has to be submitted to Google Search Console to let Google know about your website.
3. Improve Page Loading Speed
Pages’ loading speed is undoubtedly a crucial part of your website. This is because Google bots crawl and index billions of web pages. And if your web pages load slower than the specified time, crawlers will quit the website leaving it un-indexed. Hence, you must optimize the page loading speed for better SEO.
You can follow best practices for page speed optimization, such as upgrading the hosting plan, enabling compression, JavaScript, reducing redirects, etc. And to keep an eye on your website’s speed, use Google Search Console or PageSpeed Insights and others.
4. Update Robot.text File
First, you should know that the Robot.txt file is not for all websites. Robot.txt files instruct search crawlers whether to coral a page or not. It means if you want your site to rank securely, you should consider the Robot.txt file.
Now let’s see what conditions are behind having this file. First, by using Robot.txt files, you can avoid duplicate content by redirecting. Second, if you want to secure customers’ data, use Robot.txt files.
And lastly, Robot.txt files prevent your site from indexing if you don’t want Google to index it.
5. Fix Broken Links (Error 404)
How’d you like to go on a road that has no destination? Unfortunately, search crawlers don’t spend time to recan a website if they find broken links on it. Hence, if your site contains many broken links, you mind end up un-indexing your site.
The 404 error happens in certain cases, such as;
- If you’ve changed a link and forgot to update
- A landing page of a product or service that you no longer sell
- Promotion pages that expired long ago, etc.
You can use different tools to detect and remove 404 error links. To learn more about broken links and to fix them, read our blog.
6. Avoid Duplicate Page
Duplicated pages create issues for Google to crawl and index pages of your website. It simply means when content already exists somewhere on your website. They are not often the exact match as the source but can be rephrased with a few different words.
You must remember that Google doesn’t like crawling the same thing again. Thus, to avoid this situation, you must use canonical tags only if your website has duplicated page.
Or you can remove those duplicated pages that aren’t necessary anymore because they can affect your ranking profoundly.
7. Remember Canonical Tags
Canonical tags are essential to implement if your website has duplicate pages or content. It indicates search crawlers crawl only the main page instead of multiple similar pages. That’s why canonical tags are very helpful in telling Google to index only the pages you want to be indexed.
However, there can be another problem with using canonical tags. If your website doesn’t have the source page of duplicate pages, Google will index a wrong page that doesn’t exist. In this case, you can use URL inspection tools to detect and eliminate such tags from your website.
8. Don’t Leave A Page Unlinked
An unlinked or orphaned page is not linked to your website’s home page or any other page. And this is why Google’s crawlers and visitors also can’t find these pages, which makes the page unindexed.
So while publishing a page, make sure to interlink it with pages or with the home page navigation of your site. Remember, you should not leave a page unindexed if you want your site to rank well on SERPs.
9. Publish Textual Versions of Visual Content
Images and videos are great for better readability and user experience. But unfortunately, crawlers don’t understand these media files – so what to do?
You can publish a written text followed by keywords to explain multimedia files to Google. It will help bots understand the files and index them appropriately. However, you can also create an XML video sitemap for better indexing.
In this way, you can index your website’s textual and visual content. And all it requires is good SEO practices.
10. Don’t Forget To Audit Your Site
Once you’ve done all the methods above, it’s time to audit your site. This process will let you know your site’s crawling and indexability credit.
First, check your site’s crawling and indexing ability to avoid any issues with Google’s crawlers. You can use Google Search Console to see already indexed pages and find out the pages that require indexing from your CMS (WordPress, Wix, etc.). Make sure the rate doesn’t go below 90% – if it does, reconsider fixing issues.
Indexability rate = Google’s indexed pages divided by the total pages of your site
Remember, you must index your website’s updated or newly published pages. Use Google Search Console to check whether the page is indexed or not.
If you’re still confused about how to increase your website crawling and indexability, feel free to reach Digi Marketing Tech. We help businesses grow with organic and paid traffic from SEO and social media. Call us now!
Conclusion
Just like readability for better engagement for the audience, crawling and indexability help Google’s crawlers understand your page. If you follow the latest methods and implement them appropriately, Google will index your site at its best.
But you should understand that ranking your site is not a one-day task. It takes lots of practice and patience. So get yourself ready with all the tools you need and build your site for Google’s crawling and indexing.
