Last week, we explored the reasons why your website might not be indexed in search results, but now that you’ve made sure it is, how can you speed up the indexing process?
Why is speed important in indexing?
There may be a few reasons why you would want content on your site to be indexed more quickly. You might have optimised the page to improve its performance and want to test to see if the content improvements have helped to improve the site’s performance in search, or maybe you’ve updated a meta title or description to increase your clickthrough rate.
There are four main ways you can help Google and other search engines index your site quickly:
- XML sitemaps
One of the oldest and most reliable ways to beckon a search engine to crawl your content, an XML sitemap gives a list to search engines of the content on your site, as well as details such as when the content was last updated.
All you need to do is submit your XML sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console to help those two search engines index your site.
- Request indexing in Google Search Console
You can request a page to be indexed in Google Search Console too. It’s very easy – simply copy the URL of the page you want indexed, paste it into the box at the top of the platform, let Google get the information it needs from its server and then click ‘Request indexing’.
If you have multiple pages you want indexed, this can be time consuming, so there are other ways you can do this. One is to use the ‘Google Indexing for Rank Math’ plugin on WordPress – if you sign up to EngageWeb.Club (see the end of the article), there will soon be a video on this and how to get it set up.
- Participate in Bing’s IndexNow
If you want the content to be indexed in Bing, you can use IndexNow, which is a protocol used to alert search engines of updated or new content. Please do note that IndexNow isn’t currently supported by Google, but may be in the future.
- Bing Webmaster Tools
The last way is to submit the content you want indexed through Bing Webmaster Tools, through the ‘URL Submission’ option in the left sidebar. You can do this for multiple URLs.
If you’re looking to grow your business online and want to get actionable tips, why not sign up to our new EngageWeb.Club subscription, with loads of videos to help you learn how you can grow your online presence?
- Key takeaways from Google’s latest search reviews update - November 10, 2023
- Mobile-first indexing: what is it, and why has it taken so long? - November 3, 2023
- Google updates structured data understanding - October 31, 2023
