Dec
23

What Does Being Indexed in Google Actually Mean – Solve the Mystery

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Have you ever wondered “Why Doesn’t anyone visit my website or social media content?” Not being indexed in Google could be the main reason.

When people search for your content in must be indexed in order to “show up”.  There are two kinds of content on the web, content that just exists and content that exists and is indexed.  You might ask yourself, what is indexing and how do I do it?

According to Wikipedia indexing is:

Web indexing (or Internet indexing) refers to various methods for indexing the contents of a website or of the Internet as a whole. Individual websites or intranets may use a back-of-the-book index, while search engines usually use keywords and metadata to provide a more useful vocabulary for Internet or onsite searching.

Think of the indexing in the Public Library.  Would you ever be able to find a specific book if it weren’t for the good ole Dewey Decimal Classification.  The web works the same way. Content must be indexed in order for Google to find it.  It would be pretty hard to find a book on the library shelf if it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

The new weekly blog post has just been created, it took you all week!

You did all the hard work;

  • research to make it an extremely interesting
  • research to make it informative
  • graphics were inserted
  • video was embeded from YouTube
  • outbound links were researched and inserted
  • added inbound links, found a great post you created before that was applicable
  • keyword focused.

Plus you used your Facebook account to distribute it to your friends and followers. Why is it that no one seems to have read it? You thought it would show up in Google right away. It’s likely because it isn’t indexed.

How Can I Tell If My Site is Indexed

Open a new tab in your browser

Type in:   Site: http://www.YourWebsiteName.com Below is what I would type in for Butterfly Networking.  You just switch out your website name instead of mine.

 

 

Check the results, does your site show up?  If yes great you are definitely doing something right. If no, more work is required.

In the case of Google they send out GoogleBots AKA:spiders to crawl the net searching for content.  All of the search engines send out these spiders, however it appears Google sends out more and they “crawl” deeper than the others.  Yes, these spiders do crawl Facebook and other social media sites.  However they have to be “crawled” just like other web pages before they can be indexed.  Google has to crawl your content before they “decide” to index it.  Not all content is indexed.  Computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often and how many pages to fetch from each site.  https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/

How Do I Get my Site Indexed?

Within the Google suite of webmaster tools you can submit your site or even an individual post to Google’s list to be crawled.  When I first heard about this process I thought OMG that is so complicated.  It’s not actually bad.  There are a number of steps, the first being signed into your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account you can create one for free.  Once signed in you can sign up for Google Search Console, they have directions on how to complete this process.

  1. Go to Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools),
  2. Sign into your Google account and
  3. Click the red button to add your website. Once you’ve clicked the button to add your site, just
  4. Type your website URL in the box.
  5. Click the blue button to continue.
  6. Please make sure you enter your complete url.

If you want to make sure all of the pages within your website are indexed you can perform the same “site:” search as above.

Once complete repeat the same process for Bing and the other search engines.

Rather not do this over and over again?  I can do it for you if you would prefer.

If you have a WordPress blog you can also create a sitemap and submit that, but that’s a different blog post. 🙂

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