Identify Indexed Pages With Google Search Console
Posted By Gaurav | 12-Oct-2022 | Search Engine Optimization“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for the users”
Indexing your web pages is one of the best practices to partner with Google. The ultimate aim of any website is to reach out to people, bring in traffic, generate leads, convert them into business (either subscribing to newsletters/buying your service or product).
Investing in a well-designed website without proper SEO will not satisfy the purpose. You can get visitors only when your website appears in the Search Engine Result Pages. To show up in SERPs, you must show up to the Search Engine, i.e. your page must be in the index of Google.
An index is a database that has all the content deemed to serve its users. To get into the index, you must change your web pages into indexed pages.
PROCESS OF INDEXING:
Indexed pages are significant pages of your website that a crawler finds easy to crawl and show up to the users. The users can click on that particular URL to redirect themselves to your webpage.
When they are on your website, you can use various On-page SEO practices individually or done by the SEO services company to redirect them to your landing page and convert them into your business/subscribers. By now, you might have understood the importance of indexing, and here is the process of indexing your web page
- Go to Google Search Console.
- Click on URL Inspection available on the left side.
- On the search bar, paste the URL of the webpage you would like to index on Google.
- Wait and then click on the Request indexing button.
- If your page is indexed, it shows that your URL is on Google.
HOW TO CHECK THE INDEXED PAGES OF A SITE?
Knowing that the index page acts as an entrance gate to your visitors, you must regularly check if they are performing well. You can rework those pages if it shows any error/warning. To identify whether your pages are indexed or not, you can use a simple search query “site:(your website)”. The results of the search request show the number of indexed pages of the particular website in the search query.
Google’s John Muller reminds us that the results of the query ‘site: your website’ are not meant to show all indexed pages of a website. In one of the Ask Googlebot video series on Youtube, a person raised a question.
“ All of my URLs are indexed and when I check in Google one by one, the total number of URLs is 180. But in Google SERPs, only 28 URLs show. Why is that?”
Muller replies that the query is not meant to be complete, nor used for diagnostics purposes. It is perfectly normal not to show all the indexed pages as the results of the site: query. He also adds that one can use the free tool known as Google Search Console to identify the indexed pages of a website. One can also click on the coverage option available on the left side and know whether the indexed page is
- Valid
- Valid but has a warning
- Contains an error
- Excluded (Not indexed)
You don’t have to worry if some of your indexed pages do not appear on the search results of the site: query. Always double verify with Google Search Console to know whether your newly published article/page is listed in the index of Google. If the Google Search Console gives a green signal, you will definitely have traffic to your site.
Also Read – Upgrade Your SEO Strategy Through Google Tools