If you want your website’s content to be included in the results of the search engine, they need to be included in the Google index. Imagine the Google index as an index in a library, which lists information about all the books the library has available – it is the same, but with web pages. When Google scans your site, it detects new and updated pages and updates the Google index.

The internet is like an ever-growing library with billions of books, and no central filing system. Google uses web crawlers to discover publicly available web pages. Crawlers look at web pages and follow links on those pages, bringing data about those web pages back to Google’s servers. However, you don’t want your site to be indexed just once - you want Google to keep re-indexing your site regularly because frequent indexing improves your search results.

In short, here is how the process works:

1. Crawling - Search engine bots crawl the website to figure out if it’s worth indexing.

2. Indexing - The search engine adds the website to its database – the Google index.

3. Ranking - The search engine ranks the website in terms of metrics like relevance and user-friendliness.

When you are looking to resolve your indexing issues, it’s important to remember that indexing simply means the site is stored in Google’s databases. It doesn’t mean it will show up at the top of the search results.

How to find out if your site is indexed?

To check your indexed pages, simply type in site:yourwebsite.com. You can also do the same for finding individual web pages such as site:yourwebsite.com/blog

No results will show up if the page you are looking for isn’t indexed.

How to fix it if it isn’t?

If your website or page is new, it might not be indexed yet as it takes some time for Google to crawl it, and more time after that to index it. The total time can be anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks. If Google can’t find pages on your site after this period of time, it’s probably because either Google can't find the pages (crawl), or can't understand them properly when it does find them (index).

Other reasons why your site is not showing up include:

You’re not using a sitemap
Your website is not mobile-friendly
Your website loads slowly
Your website has limited or duplicated content
Your meta tags are set up as No-index/No-follow
You’ve incurred a penalty and Google has deindexed your site
You’ve blocked the crawler in your robots.txt
There is a technical issue with your site that is preventing Google from crawling and indexing your site

Here are a few steps you can take to resolve indexing issues:

1. Submit a sitemap

A sitemap tells Google exactly which pages you want to be crawled. Many website building platforms create and submit a sitemap for you, so you don't need to. Essentially a sitemap tells Google which pages on your site are important, and which aren’t, and gives them an idea on how often they should be re-crawled.

2. Create links between pages

Provide easy link navigation within your site so that your visitors can reach any page on your site by following a chain of one or more links from your homepage. Pages without internal links pointing to them are considered to be ‘orphan pages’ and because Google discovers new content by crawling the web, they’re unable to discover orphan pages through that process.

3. Set up your domain on Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in search results. By setting up your site you will be able to spot any issues in real-time and fix them using Google’s guidance.

4. Request indexing

Once your Google Search Console is up and running, it’s a good practice to request indexing on your new pages. You’re effectively telling Google that you’ve added something new to your site and that they should look at it. However, requesting indexing won’t resolve any problems preventing indexing old pages.

5. Build high-quality backlinks

Backlinks indicate to Google that a web page is important, and these are the pages that Google wants to index. Because Google sees pages with high-quality links as more important, they’

How to get your website indexed by Google