If your site is not discovered or crawlable by search engines, how would you expect it to get indexed and visible in search results?
When talking about SEO and search visibility, the most common subjects in the shatter are keywords and content. And they should be. However, an at least as important factor is crawlability and discoverability (is that a word?).
What I am talking about is how well your site and webpages are likely to be indexed correctly. I will describe the “lifeline” of a webpage or URL and also give you a couple of things to have in mind.
Do you smile when someone says Google Search Console? If you do, then I guess you are more familiar with the importance and the tricks you can pull to get your content indexed. Never forget that Google bots are the ones that have the final decision on indexing webpages, but you can guide them well enough to be satisfied with the result.
How does indexing and crawlability works?
First things first, so you get the right understanding on how it all works seamlessly well together.
There are three steps in lifeline of a webpage - discovered, crawled and indexed. The goal is the last one of course, but how to get there?
When you send in your sitemap, it first gets discovered. This means that the bots are aware of the existance of the URL - "hey, thanks for the information". This does not mean that the URL is indexed or even crawled, it is just there.
The next phase is crawled. This means that the URL has been crawled by the bots, and all the meta information has been processed over to them. This does not mean that they have indexed the URL - they have just gathered the information about it.
So, now you have the URL both discovered and crawled. So how do you get it indexed then?
There are a couple of things you now need to do/can do in order to get it indexed properly. First, make sure you have other articles, pages on your site pointing to the URL through internal links. These internal links guide the bots to the URL.
Next, add the URL in the sitemap and submit the submit again in Search Console.
The third thing is to manually ask google to index the site. This is easily done in Search Console and will give you a boost in indexing.
About the author:
I have been working with SEO and things related to digital marketing since 2013. Experienced in different fields such as ecommerce, igaming, b2b and others. I had the opportunities to work with some of the best in world
when it comes to SEO and succesful marketing and converions.
Geographical areas I have worked with are (for example): Nordics, European (english speaking) and US.
I speak English (C2 advanced, CEFR test), Swedish (native), Norwegian (knowledgeable) Spanish (beginner), and Italian (beginner).
Magnus Strandberg, SEO Conusaltant