How to index a website and how long it takes

Knowing how to index a website, and how long it takes to perform the task, is important for one’s content to gain more favorable search engine rankings and receive more organic traffic.

To succeed, one must, primarily, report the existence of the site to search engines and enter the keywords (keywords) most typed by users in their Internet searches.

Table of Contents:
Difference between indexing and ranking
How to check on Google whether a website is indexed?
How to index a website
Signing up for Google Search Console
How to index a WordPress site
How long does it take to index a site on Google
Crawlers, backlinks, internal links and URLs to speed up
Make your own website
Difference between indexing and ranking
Before delving into indexing, it is good to know how to distinguish it from positioning.
Indexing is the mechanism that takes the form of cataloging a website’s content within a search engine’s database, which will then return the same content on the SERP.

Ranking, on the other hand, is the position that an indexed site reaches in the SERP, that is, in the screen generated by search engines as a result of any query. This result depends on the activity of search engine algorithms, which continuously process hundreds of elements on the web. More specifically, search engine bots index any site made available on the web, but this does not always result in good rankings. To make this happen, the steps described in the following paragraphs must be put in place.

How to check Google to see if a website is indexed?
There are two ways to check if your website is indexed on Google:

See what the SERP returns once you use the string site:iltuosito.it: if there are no results, indexing of the website in question has not occurred.
Do the verification on Google Search Console, which we will see is the strictly necessary tool for indexing a website.
How to index a website
How can a website be indexed? Below, we will look at some useful best practices to achieve the goal.

Signing up for Google Search Console
The first step in indexing a site on the search engine is to create a property on Google Search Console. This is a console that allows you to monitor and manage your website’s presence in the SERPs, but not only that.

Search Console provides the tools necessary to display traffic data about your site, such as how often your site appears in Google search, for which search queries your site is shown the click-through rate of users for those queries.

How to index a WordPress site
To implement indexing of a WordPress site, without relying too much on the normal crawling activity of search engine bots, you can equally resort to Search Console. Within this tool, in fact, there is the possibility of integrating a sitemap.

This XML-generated element allows Google to scan all pages and add their respective URLs to its index, which also aids content ranking.

In this sense, WordPress makes available special plugins for the creation of sitemaps that, once completed, will be inserted on Search Console.

How long does it take to index a site on Google
You cannot precisely define how long it will take search engines to index a site. You can take action to shorten the physiological time by implementing the techniques outlined in the preceding paragraphs, namely by flagging your site and uploading a sitemap.

In this way, you can see your site pop up, in the SERPs of search engines, within a few hours, days or weeks. The uncertainty, about the timing, is more pronounced in the case of an eCommerce with a high amount of pages, especially if it is not structured functionally and correctly.

Indexing times are also sensitive to the history that a website represents. A new site has less opportunity to be indexed than one that has its roots in the past and has already had many hits in public interest.

Crawlers, backlinks, internal links and URLs to speed up
One of the tricks to push indexing is publishing quality content, an aspect that also significantly affects website ranking. This is because Google’s crawler may assign crawling priority to relevant and valuable pages that may be of interest to users.

Similarly, it is advisable to optimize crawl paths with the Robots.txt file, which is used to prevent crawlers from accessing specific content on your website, such as a particular directory or images.

Another method of hastening indexing is through backlinks, or links that, starting from other sites, lead to your own. Quite effective is also the practice of internal linking of a website, i.e., internal hyperlinks by which Google can more easily “enter” all its internal pages.

In addition to the other systems described above, to speed up indexing one can also try the route of adding another URL that addresses one’s own site. This method, however, which until a few decades ago was the only one used, on its own acts slowly and brings little benefit.

Make your own website
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Our offer includes four plans that are compatible with the best-known CMS, WordPress, or even with WooCommerce and to PrestaShop if your intention is to set up an online store.