How To Get Google To Crawl Your Site: 10 Easy Steps

If your website is not getting the traffic you want, you might want to check if your website is even indexed. If this is the case, then it’s as good as being invisible online.

What Is Indexing?

Some research shows that 33% of your website’s traffic comes from organic search while others claim that it makes up as much as 64% of your traffic. To increase your website traffic, you have to get Google to index your website. Only then will Google spiders, called Googlebots, crawl your site. Here’s a yearlong case study about everything you need to know about Googlebots.

During crawling, Google searches for new websites. The spiders also use hyperlinks to find new content. Afterward, Google puts these websites in a large database to get indexed. You still need to get your website ranked if you want to get to the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Are You Indexed?

To check if Google has indexed your website, type “site:” in the Google search bar without the quotations, then type your website name. If you don’t see any result, it means your website is not yet indexed. But you can change that by helping Google crawl your site and following these steps:

1. Go to Google Search Console (previously called Google Webmaster Tools).
2. Choose the “URL Inspection Tool.”
3. Type in the website you want indexed in the search bar.
4. Wait for Google to find the right website.
5. Choose the “Request Indexing” option.

Perform these steps every time you start a new site or publish a new page to an existing website. This will inform Google that they have to index the new site or page.

10 Tricks To Get Your Site Indexed

If you’re running an eCommerce site, it is even more necessary to get your website indexed to reach its full potential. Here are some more tricks to help you do this:

1. Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console

To check the progress of your indexing efforts, check the eCommerce stats related to your website traffic. Google Analytics can help with more than just monitoring traffic. It also monitors each visitor’s time on your site, their location, what pages they checked and more.

You also need to install Google Search Console. It can monitor various aspects of your site, such as indexing errors, when the bots crawled it last, potential security issues and more.

2. Capitalize On Internal Links

Look for the most authoritative web pages on your site and add their links to pages that need to get indexed. But take note that linked pages must be relevant to each other.

Conduct some site audits, too, to make sure that you do not have orphaned sites. These are sites that do not have incoming links. If you find these sites, delete them or include them in your internal link structure.

3. Prevent Low-Quality Pages From Getting Indexed

High-quality content improves the frequency of your site getting crawled, indexed or ranked. But low-quality content does the opposite.

Pages that your audience still finds valuable but are useless to search engines have to be set to NOINDEX. These pages include paid landing pages, thank you pages and such. Sets of these pages must be blocked using the Robot.txt.file.

Pages that are no longer valuable to both the search engine and your audience, but have links or existing traffic, have to be set to be 301 redirected. Similar pages, but without any traffic or links, must be deleted (404).

4. Post On Social Media

Google also crawls social media posts. Share some of your web pages on Facebook, Twitter or whatever you use for your business. This can help your site get indexed and drive traffic to your homepage. Don’t forget to put your link in your social media bios, too.

5. Get Your Site Pinged

Use websites that send “pings” to Google to notify them that a new page or website is available to get crawled. This is one of the easiest, free tricks to get indexed by Google.

6. Keep Making New Content

Older sites get crawled more. But regardless of your site’s age, it can get crawled more frequently if you keep posting new content.

7. Establish Your Authority

Pages that get a lot of inbound links from highly authoritative sites are more likely to get crawled. One way to do it is to make infographics about trending topics. Use factual data to attract more people and improve engagement with your audience.

You can also interview the influencers in your industry. These kinds of articles often get linked to by the experts you interviewed and other people who are interested in what these experts have to say.

8. Produce High-Quality Content

Google only crawls quality content that does not use black hat tactics, such as keyword stuffing or linking to questionable sources. Create unique and engaging content that is informative and helpful to your audience. Only then will the Google spiders pay attention.

9. Accept Guest Posts

This will help your site get indexed faster and establish your authority. It will bring new traffic to your site, thanks to your guest posters’ fans.

10. Create A Blog

If your website doesn’t have one yet, consider starting one now. Every new blog article you release will bring traffic and Googlebots to your site.

While working to get your site indexed, remember that your website should be valuable to both Google and your audience. Use the tricks mentioned above and get a rank closer to the first page or even the No 1 spot in the SERPs.