How to Get Google to Index Your Site
Zack Greenfield • August 4, 2021
We're going to continue our SEO video series here, and we're going to attack the first sort of big step with your website, which is getting the thing indexed or finding out if it's indexed. So stick with me and we're going to unpack that right now.
And we've done our video on how to set up search console and get that connected and get your site validated in there. So then you can start to see your analytics, you know, what's going on with the site and everything like that, and submit your site map and you know, these types of things.
So there's a lot of features in search console, but the first thing everybody wants to know is is their site actually index, like if somebody searches for your website, are they going to even find it on Google search engine? So that is what we're going to cover today. And there's really two or three quick little things to know about this.
The first thing is when you want to see what is index for any site, including yours, especially if it's a new site, you can simply type in the word site and then a space, and then the URL of the site. And you put that in Google search bar and then it'll bring up what They have indexed for that site.
Now the next thing and the, one of the ones I like to do, and you should always do these in an incognito browser, right? So there's not a history on the machine. It's sort of presenting it to the search engine. Like it's a fresh query. Just always use the incognito browser when you're doing these types of looks at your own site, because you don't want to poison the results with your browser history or anything like that. That's been tracked on the machine that you're using. The other thing that I do sometimes, and I also like is another way to cross-check stuff is to type in the name of the site. So we'll use mine as an example. So my site is Zack greenfield.com. So if I wanted to see what was index, I would just type Zack space, Greenfield space.com and see what comes up when we do that broken search of the website.
So you take your domain, break it up and break the dot, come off the end, search that in an incognito browser. And that'll also give you a good indication of what's happening there. So you've got two choices there to kind of cross-check what is currently, if anything is indexed. Now the next is we're going to go back into that search console account. And we're just going to navigate to the URL inspection tool. We're going to paste our URL into that. Let the system submit it, let the system validate and check the URL. And then you're just going to click request indexing, right? So if you have a new site, this is the fast way to get it up in there. Now that'll send, or basically, you know, request that the Google crawler bot come and check out your URL. It doesn't happen.
Instantaneously may have to give it a day or two because that little sucker is busy with a million things to do so you just, but it puts you on the schedule to be looked at then that can help accelerate the indexing process if you've been waiting. And I got to tell you, if you don't do anything, you could wait weeks and, and maybe nothing comes up. So you really want to take control of this and do these couple of steps quickly when you're putting up a new site or if your site is really not doing so well on SEO. And you want to kind of find out what is index. What's not, this is a place to start. So
If this stuff helped you out a little bit on this quick tip, we're going to move forward with our SEO videos. Go ahead and hit the like button for me and we'll see you on the next one.