How to Get Google To Index Your Site

The most frustrating thing for a content creator is to spend hours and days writing a content , you publish your article thinking that it is the best out there .

Then days become months and you realize that there is no traffic coming to your article , you type in the targeted search term and your article is nowhere to be found .

And later you realize your article is not even indexed .

So in this video , we'll be talking about the things that you could do to get Google to index your site much faster with the help of rank map , how to check if a page on your website is indexed .

The things that could prevent your website from getting index and do stick with me to the end because I'm throwing some bonus tips to help improve the chances of getting your pages indexed .

So let's go .

Hey , it's Jack here from Rama , the wordpress S E O plug in that gives your business the best chance of beating your competitors on search engines .

We put out a lot of videos to help you grow your search traffic .

So consider subscribing to our channel to get S E O and business knowledge delivered straight to your youtube notification .

Now , before everything else , we got to understand the concept of getting pages indexed on Google and it consists of two phases .

The first first phase is the discovery or crawling phase where your site will be found by Google .

The web is a jungle of information and although Google has sorted and indexed billions of pages , there is still a constant flow of new pages entering the web and known pages being updated or deleted .

Google has to constantly seek for new and updated content to keep itself relevant .

So it uses robots or spiders called Google boards to fetch or crawl .

Billions of pages on the web every single day .

It does that by either following a link from a known page to a new page or crawling a list of pages provided by site owners called site maps .

Once Google discovers a page URL it cross the page to find out what's on it .

It analyzes the non text and text content as well as the overall visual layout to decide if a page should be sent for indexing .

Once the page is found and crawled , the indexing phase will begin where the crowd page will be processed in order to understand the purpose , meaning context intent and everything about the page , which includes the title tag , text content , al attributes , images , videos and more so that Google knows how to sort and rank your content on different search terms that extends out to the third phase which is serving and ranking your content .

But that's not our focus in this video .

Our focus is to get your content indexed .

So that's the simple concept of Google indexing .

If you want to know how to optimize your content for better rankings , you can check out this video right here .

We will show you some cool methods to optimize your content for better search ranking .

Now let me walk you through some practical ways to get your page index on Google and some other search engines .

As you know , there are millions of pages entering the web every day .

So your best chance of getting noticed by Google is to submit your site map .

It sounds complicated , but it's actually quite easy .

I'll walk you through step by step .

Now you can go through the manual way of connecting your site to Google search console and submit your site map manually to it .

But let me show you a much simpler way to do it through our rank map plug in on your wordpress dashboard .

Go to plugins and install plugins .

You want to make sure that the rank map plug-in is installed if you haven't done so you can click on add new and on the search bar , search for rank map , you want to install and activate this plug in .

Once you have done that on the side bar , click on rank maf and you'll be prompted to connect your account .

If you have an existing rank map account , you can connect it by clicking on this .

But if you don't , you can click on this and register for a free account .

Once you have done that , you'll be prompted with the setup .

Wi I recommend that you select the advanced mode because there will be a lot more modules that will be available to you .

If you select this option , you can go through the set up at your pace .

But what's important is this step when you will connect rank map to your Google services such as search console and analytics .

With this step , you don't need to go through the steps to verify your site with Google search console .

All you need to do is to sign into your Google account where you want to set up your Google search console .

Let me give you an example .

I've logged into this account and I have not set up any properties or link any website to it .

So I want to log in with this account .

Now , in this step , rank map is asking for permission for these .

And it is important that you check all these boxes because that way Rang F can do its job to give you all the benefits .

As promised , you don't have to worry about R M F seeing your analytics data , like the amount of traffic coming to your site , it's referring pages and all those other site data because we simply don't store your data on our server .

We just access it , draw out all the information and store it on your server .

We don't even look , that's how important your privacy is to us .

So be rest assured that we have no control over your data .

Let's continue once you have connected your Google account , give it a while and you will notice that your current website is now added to your Google Search console .

There is no need for you to manually add and verify your website .

That's one of the big benefits for going through that step .

Now , you will also have this option to enable the index status tab , which is very useful for ring map pro users .

As all the indexing data from Google search console will be analyze sorted and displayed directly on your website .

I will show you what I mean in a while .

You can also set up your Google analytics account and your adsense account if you are a rank map pro user .

But that will be a topic for another video as we go to the next step .

This is the most important step .

You have got to keep this toggled on and make sure that all the post types and assets that you wish to be included in the site maps for indexation are selected and these are the two most important steps to complete to get your site map ready .

Now , as you return to your dashboard .

The final step is for you to submit your site map to Google search console .

And you can find your site map by going to the site map settings .

And you will see the link to your site map here .

If you visit the link , you will see your post page and category site maps , click into each of them and you will see a list of all the URL S that you have in the site map .

This makes it easy for Google and other search engines to discover all the links on your site .

So back to your site , you want to right , click and copy this link and you want to go to Google search console .

If you don't know how to reach this page , you can just search for it on Google .

If not , we have left a link to this page in the description , let's click on start .

Now , once you have logged in into the Google account that is connected with math and you click on the left hamburger menu , click on select property and you will see your website listed here .

That's because Rang Maf has added and verified your website with Google search console .

Let's select our sites and you will see this is a brand new website to submit a site map , click on site maps and for some of you , you will already see Rang Maf submitting the site map for you automatically .

So you don't have to submit your site map manually .

But just in case you do not see this , you want to paste the site map , link here and make sure to keep just the URL slug and you want to hit submit .

Once you have submitted successfully , Google will periodically process your site map and look for changes , which means Google now knows your site exists and they will be sending their robots to visit your site on the schedule that they have set .

And that's how you submit your site map to Google search console .

Now , in case you are an anxious person like me , who wants Google to know every movement on my website , you can always resubmit your site map here , but it is going to take you a lot of time and you can't focus on what is important .

So we have added a feature in rank map to ping search engines .

In other words , give search engines a nudge periodically and tell them that there are changes to our site map .

You can find this setting on the site map setting and right at the bottom , you will see this here .

You want to keep this setting on .

If there are individual pages , you want Google to take notice of immediately or as soon as possible , you can copy your page URL and paste it on the URL inspection tool and hit enter or return here is where you know , if your page is indexed on Google or not .

If it is not indexed .

Like this example , you can click on request indexing and Google will add your page to its crawling queue .

You'll probably need to give it a couple of days before testing the page URL again .

You don't need to re requests for indexing after you have submitted because it will not give you any advantage in terms of crawling .

If the page is indexed , you will see something like this .

And if you have made changes to this page and you want Google to notice the changes as soon as possible , click on request indexing again .

That's how simple it is .

Two additional matters .

I want to show you to make sure that search engines notice your pages .

The first is something called instant indexing .

This is super useful for time sensitive content such as news coverage , job posting or live streaming to use this , you need to install and activate a standalone plug-in called instant indexing for Google by rank math .

And once you have done that under rank maf and instant indexing under the console , you can add all the URL S of your new articles , the updated articles or the URL S that are removed from your website and you want to hit send to API you can also configure this to be done automatically .

If you want more information about setting up instant indexing for Google , you can check out the video popping up at the top , right .

The other method is something called index now , which is an initiative by Microsoft and Yandex to help search engines cross sites more efficiently , Google is currently testing this method as well and Rama is very well prepared for it .

You can visit this page to find out more about it .

The most straightforward method I've shown you is to go to Google search console and paste your page link in the URL inspection tool .

The other method is just to search for the targeted keyword on Google .

And if your content is ranked , maybe it is not on the first page , but it happens to be on the 1st 10 pages .

It means that your page is indexed , just type in site colon and you want to paste your page URL right after it without any spaces and hit enter .

If your site is not indexed , nothing will show here .

But if it is indexed , you will see a search result like this .

You can check your Google search console under coverage and see if a particular URL is having an error valid with warning if it is valid or if it is excluded .

If there is an error , you want to know what error it is and you want to fix it .

The same goes with the valid , with warning and with valid .

It means that these pages are indexed on Google and with excluded .

These are the reasons that these pages here are excluded from indexing check if that particular URL is part of this group .

Actually , the alternate page with proper canonical tag .

Sometimes your URL or your page title is too similar to the ones that are being indexed .

And Google has automatically placed a canal tag for you .

In that case , firstly , you need to make sure that the content of that page is not similar to the ones that are indexed .

Then you may want to change up your URL and title and resubmit that page for indexing .

The key here is to ensure that your content is unique from the other pages of your website .

Do you remember at the start of the video , we have toggled this option on on a setup visit with that .

We now have this index status under analytics .

This is very useful for Rama Pro users because you don't need to access Google search console .

And we have made every detail of your website much more easily accessible straight from this tab troubleshooting yourself .

Site is now much easier .

It will show you the number of pages and its percentage that is submitted and indexed and all the other indexing issues found on your website .

And we have consolidated all the data into this useful graph which makes it easy for you to identify and troubleshoot the URL S on your site .

You can use this filter feature to sort those pages that are not indexed by Google and you can identify specifically why by clicking on the results and it will tell you all the details about this URL .

For this case , this URL is blocked by robots dot T X T and Google could not fetch this page properly .

If this is not intended , you now know where the issue is .

And for the URL S that have errors , it shows that this page is blocked by a meta attack and the server returned an error page when Google attempted to crawl the page .

Another very useful data is if the user determine canal URL is the same as the Google determine canal URL if they are different .

It means that Google views your canonical URL differently and you may need to visit those pages and make sure that they are not duplicated pages for R L S that are unknown to Google .

We can take action to submit these URL S to Google using one of the methods we have discuss .

If it is true that you want these pages to be indexed , you may also encounter issues such as excluded by no index tag , which means you have submitted a page for indexing , but maybe there is a no index meta tag instructing Google not to index this page .

Anyway , these are all the issues that are commonly seen on Google search console .

If you want to learn more about each of these issues , you can visit this support document from Google that shows you what they are and how to fix them .

If you want to check this page out .

We have left a link in the description .

Now we have one more trick up our sleeves to see if your particular page is indexed on search engines .

If you're logged into your site and you visit one of your pages , you will see the wordpress task bar at the top towards the right .

You will see rank S C O hover to it and you will see a list of options here .

I don't want to go too in depth into what each of these options are .

So you can visit this link to see what other awesome features are in this quick action menu .

What we need is to check if this page is indexed .

So you wanna hover to external tools , click on Google cash and if the page is cash and index , you will see this message at the top of your page .

It shows the date when this page is cash .

And if you have made changes to this page after this page is cashed and you want Google to take notice of it , you may want to send this URL for re indexing .

But if it is not cashed , you will see this error .

These are all the common ways to discover if your page is indexed .

Of course , there are many other methods .

But what's the point right now ?

Let me ask you a question .

Imagine I am your close friend .

And for some reason you visit me every day at my house to collect something useful from me that will help you with your business .

But every time you visit me instead of giving you something useful , I always present you with something that you don't like to the core .

For example , I always betray your trust .

My question to you is would you visit me more or would you visit me less or would you not visit me at all ?

The same thing that is going to happen with Google .

It doesn't like duplicate content to the core .

So will you visit your site often if you always serve , duplicate content to them ?

I'm pretty sure you know the answer , but the truth is they will visit your site less often .

So your site will be cra less frequently .

If you are a victim to this , maybe you want to consolidate all the similar content and information into one single page and remove the rest of the pages with a 301 redirect to the main page .

Or if you think your duplicate content , for example , your service pages with different currencies and prices are still relevant to your business and you can't delete them , then you want to add a canonical URL to all the duplicated pages pointing to one page .

So that Google will index that page and would not index the rest of the pages .

Also as what I discussed earlier about alternate page with proper can tag when visiting your Google search console .

You can use that method to other things that could stop Google from indexing your pages .

Probably come from the settings on your site .

It's like Google knocking on your door and you put out a sign saying we are closed .

So to prevent that from happening first on your wordpress dashboard under settings and reading , want to make sure that this discouraged search engine option is unchecked .

If it is checked , you are basically putting a sign saying we are not open for business .

So make sure that this is unchecked .

Then if you have our rank map plug-in installed , you want to go to titles and me and under global matter , you want to make sure that the robot's matter is set to index .

This will ensure that all the pages , post or custom post types will be set to the index option by default .

And just to make sure that all the post types are set with the index option , visit post and under the post robots matter .

If this is turned off , it will follow the global matter , we have said earlier , which is to index .

But if this is turned on with no index , make sure that it is set with the index option .

The same goes for the other post types .

And in case there is this particular page or post that you have done everything to get it index , but it is still not index after a couple of weeks or months .

You want to go to the individual page under rank math select advance and you want to make sure that the robots matter is set to index for this post .

Robots dot T X T is also another cause of the problem .

By default .

If you use math under general settings , you will see the edits robots dot T X T option .

If there is no conflicting robots dot T X T file on your file manager of your website , we will add a code like this for you .

I don't want to go too deep into this as it may become technical .

But as long as you do not see a code like this , that this allows your entire site to be crawled , you are fine .

You can check this page out as we have out some useful information to help you understand robots dot T X T .

Now , if you see this message where it says content are locked because a robot dot T X T file is present in the root folder .

This means that in the file manager of your website , you have an existing robots dot T X T file .

You can visit the contents of this file if your site has the code I've mentioned .

But if you want rank maf to manage your robots dot T X T file , just delete the existing file in your file manager .

Head back to your rank maf and refresh this page and you will see the default configurations from rank map .

If you don't see this , you can visit this page .

We have left the link in the description as well .

Copy this set of codes , head back to your website and paste it here .

All you need to do is to replace this site map link accordingly which in this case , it is this and you can save changes as promised since you are still tuned in .

I want to share with you some cool bonus tips .

Do you remember at the start of the video ?

I mentioned that Google will follow links on pages that they already know you need to leverage on that .

What I mean is internal links .

Some of your pages are probably ranked on search engines and are getting traffic .

So if your new page is something that is relevant to your existing page that is indexed and ranked , you may want to add an internal link on the page that is index , pointing to the page that is not index .

This is the best way to get search engines to index your new page on top of those matters that I've shared .

Another tip is just to produce unique and high quality content that are answers .

A specific query .

Remember not to go off topic and always ask yourself if every sentence on your content helps with answering the targeted topic .

If not , don't add them to your content .

Google is always in search of the best content out there .

So to stand up from the rest , you gotta write the best to your knowledge and experience .

Hey , it rhymes .

And one more thing I want to highlight , which is very common to e-commerce or listing sites is that it takes resources for Google or other search engines to crawl your site .

So if they find too many irrelevant URL S that are generated due to the filters for pricing sizes or whatever .

search robots may not know which page or pages you want them to index and they may end up giving up indexing any of your pages .

Just imagine you sell a t-shirt in sizes such as extra small , small , medium large XL X XL and you have eight different colors .

So for this t-shirt itself , it generates 48 different pages , not forgetting .

If you're sorting in price and popularity , it would generate even more filter pages .

This is what we called crawler traps .

Search engines wouldn't know what pages to crawl and index .

So we recommend adding something like this to your robots dot T X T file to prevent search robots from crawling filter pages to recap .

These are all the methods of getting your website indexed and these are the methods to know if your site is indexed .

Also , these are the probable reasons why your site is not indexed , especially when it comes to duplicate content .

You want to delete those duplicated pages with a 301 redirect to just one page or if you think you can't delete them for your use .

Case add a canonical URL for all those duplicated pages pointing to one main page .

That's it .

We hope that you are now an expert in getting your content index on Google and other search engines .

If you find this video helpful , can you do us a little favor and smash that thumbs up button ?

It means a lot to me and the rank team .

If you have any questions , feel free to leave them down below , we will do our best to help you out as much as we can and don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more S E O and business knowledge delivered straight to our youtube notification .

This is Jack from rank .

I'll see you in the next video .