When you search a query online, how do you get instant results? It’s all possible due to search engine indexing! What is search index? Crawl bots from Google Browser or other search engines collect web page data, parse info, and store details to quickly retrieve results when a user types any keyword. Google ensures that the results are high-quality and are the closest match to queries entered. Hence, getting your page indexed is even more complicated than it looks.
Read our blog to find out what is search indexing, and how you can get your pages indexed.
Table of Contents
What Is A Search Index?
Let’s deconstruct search engine indexing and get down to the basics!
Search index is the data examined by Google crawl bots (crawlers), they store web page details and fetch results based on user queries. Google search indexing is highly advanced as it deploys various algorithms to assess web pages and ensure consistency in quality. They analyze information depth, content relevance, and how up-to-date the pages are, before citing them as one of the results for a relevant keyword. Based on the parameters mentioned, some pages will be given more weightage, while others will get less, determining your page’s ranking.
How Does Search Indexing Work On Google?
We have broken down the search indexing process into 3 steps so you can start seeing your web page from Google’s perspective.
Step 1 – Google Crawlers Analyze Your Pages
Let’s take a look at how Google algorithms hunt for your pages.
- How are they attracted to your page? Google crawl bots scan your web page content based on the keywords they contain. But be careful about how you infuse popular search queries into your pages. They shouldn’t be over-stuffed or out of context.
- What do Google Crawlers look for? They analyze the structure of your sentences, their meaning, and the relevant phrases.
- How often are your pages crawled? Google should crawl pages automatically once they are published, but this also depends on your domain’s crawl budget, which varies for everyone.
Step 2 – Your Data Is Stored In Google Search Index
This stage involves a lot of filtering. Basically, crawlers in this stage want to know what your web page is about. Here are the stages in which your pages are interpreted by the crawlers.
- Tokenization: Here, the crucial bits of information are broken down into small tokens, and all punctuations are expelled.
- Stemming: These tokens are “de-stemmed,” as in their suffixes are removed to help crawlers understand the actual terms of use.
- Lemmatization: From the prior 2 stages, the de-stemmed tokens are obtained, which crawlers further analyze to find related phrases (synonyms or relevant concepts). Crawlers additionally utilize a dictionary lookup function to achieve this.
- Indexing: Now that the crawler has fully interpreted your data and extracted relevant information, an index will be generated, which will map your website’s metadata to relevant keywords, queries, or variations. The crawlers will also present a very specific set of details on the search index when any user fires a query, such as title, URL, metadata, or relevant links and FAQs of the web pages.
Step 3 – Crawlers Generate Results for User Queries
Here are the features that Google offers while compiling results for the chosen keywords. Optimize your website keeping these details in mind.
- Instant Results: Thanks to Google crawlers’ robust algorithms, you get results in seconds instead of hours.
- In-depth Query Analysis: If you use a complicated word, Google Index will efficiently match it to its alternative keyword phrase with a similar meaning. Google Index will also consider the context of your query before suggesting results (which especially matters for homonyms).
- Refining: The Google search index empowers users to refine their results based on multiple filters, such as location, date, relevance, and language.
- Predictive Input and Auto-Suggestions: The Google search index auto-completes queries inserted by users and even suggests concepts closely related to user inputs.
- Unique or slightly different results: All pages ranking for a given query vary in terms of their format or outlet, which is often compatible with different devices. They may vary with regard to information depth or may cater to different sets of users with varying perspectives. For instance, Novices or professionals. However, two similar web pages from the same website won’t clog the results for a given keyword (they are known as canonical pages).
Tools To Get Your Website On Google Search Index
Here are the tools to enable crawling and to troubleshoot factors that prevent crawling.
1. Sitemaps
There are 2 types of sitemaps. Both list URLs from your website but serve different purposes. Let’s understand their relevance to technical SEO.
- HTML sitemaps: These directories enable smooth navigation for users and are generally linked in the footer menu. While they serve a different purpose, they also allow crawlers to visit them. This is one factor that primarily enhances user experience and may also contribute towards increased crawlability.
- XML sitemap: These inventories list the web pages that you want Google algorithms to crawl. Their primary purpose is to instruct crawlers which pages to crawl.
2. Google Search Console
This free tool by Google Developers plays an extremely important role in technical SEO, website maintenance, and crawling.
Why is this tool useful?
- Index Coverage Report: To underline the technical issues preventing your pages from crawling.
- Submitting XML Sitemap: This requests that Google algorithms crawl all the web page URLs listed within the document. Google allows website owners to submit sitemaps, but other browsers, such as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, may not empower website owners with this ability.
3. Robots.txt
A robots.txt file can prevent the crawling of undesirable content. To do so, create a text file “robots.txt,” add the URLs to disallow, and upload it to the root directory via a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client.
A robots.txt file would contain 2 lines:
- User-agent Line: In this line, you specify your preferred search engine browser for indexing of your web pages.
- Disallow-directive Line: If you don’t want certain pages crawled, specify them in this line (for example, Disallow: /sample_page/).
4. Google Analytics – To detect toxic crawl bots
Some bots and spiders crawl your data online, but some bots are good, while others are bad. The good bots create different versions of your website based on devices used by readers. They scan your website health and index pages for search engine browsers. But the bad ones scrap your data, spam, or hack into your website and may even impersonate someone.
Use the “Referral Exclusion List” to detect suspicious crawl activities:
- it will remove all domains, but if you still see suspicious domains, you can permanently remove them from your future list.
- Locate the “Tracking info” section, click the “Property column,” and then go to the “Admin” section.
Make Your Website More Crawlable for Google Search Index
What factors does Google prioritize while crawling pages? Here are the parameters that Google takes into account.
1. User Experience
- Secure Socket Layers: Google is one of the most trusted search engine browsers and the number one search engine worldwide. So, it has to live up to its reputation and provide only secure results. Hence, crawlers prioritize HTTPS sites without any doubt.
- Headers: Many website owners prefer to divide their content with multiple header tags (or headings) so that users don’t lose touch and crawlers can analyze their pages more effectively. Headers provide a logical structure to your web pages and make navigation easier.
- Accessibility & Page Speed: Use lightweight elements that don’t increase your page speed. For this you would have to avoid flash images and minimize CSS files. Also, optimally use HTML tags so that the visually impaired and crawlers can easily navigate your page.
- Information Quality: Update your web pages annually to replace outdated information. Also, be as deep, original, and relevant as possible. Google hates plagiarism, scarce content, and obsolete data.
2. SEO-focused Optimizations
- SEO-optimized Images: A good website has the perfect ratio of images to text. While textual phrases are easier for Google algorithms to comprehend, images, on the other hand, give a visual glimpse of what a particular paragraph states. To make your images interpretable to Google crawlers, use alt-tags. Alternative texts ease navigation for Google and visually impaired people.
- Optimize Metadata: Metadata contains your pages’ meta title, description, and tags. This data isn’t visible within the page itself but shows up on Google search results and provides a gist of what your web pages cover. As these details are visible on result pages, you need to optimize for them and entice readers. They should also infuse primary keywords for the crawlers to analyze and map them.
- Inbound links pages (Internal links): All marketing pages on your website should be within 3 clicks. You can utilize Menubars or the homepage for this. Additionally, depending on relevance, web pages must link to other blogs or service pages. This allows crawlers to travel smoothly from one page to another; the same goes for users.
3. Backlinks
- Outbound links (External links): You can mention the references for informative pages on your website, provided they have a high authority rate. You can link to educational sites, news articles, government websites, etc.—those that aren’t your competitors.
- Backlinks: These are outbound links from other websites that lead to one of the URLs on your website. Do-follow links would allow both users and crawlers to pass through your website. While no-follow links only allow traffic to pass through, You can attract natural backlinks with white papers, case studies, or highly informative blogs. Or use other means to reach out to players serving a similar niche. However, the quality of backlinks matters or Google can penalize your site under the suspicion of “spamming.” You have to ensure that the website you receive backlinks from is related to your niche, and their website can’t have too many pop-up ads or scarce content such that it looks suspicious.
A performance-driven digital marketing company shall help you implement all these strategies without any effort!
Concluding Thoughts – Why Search Index Matters?
You now have a clear idea about what search engine indexing entails. Search index organizes your website’s content into a central database. You can optimize your site and make it crawler-friendly with the help of our recommended tools and strategies. However, as a newly rising company, you may want to take guidance from experts and ensure that your pages crawl and rank as much as possible.
Expert insights are especially crucial if you need help with SEO or PPC campaigns; these activities also help improve your overall rank!
