Website Indexing

Website indexing is the process of downloading data from webpages and storing it into databases by search engines. They do this because they need to process data to display the most relevant results to their users.

So, web page indexing is important for websites to be displayed in search engines against user queries. The question is, how to get your website indexed?

There are many methods provided by search engines that help in improving the indexing of any website. Below are the methods.

XML Sitemap

XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemaps, for websites, are an accumulation of webpage URLs that helps search engines to develop an understanding of how this website wants to be crawled. Below is a sample URL set that appears in xml sitemap.

<url>
    <loc>https://eebew.com/spider/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-12-25</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>

The above xml tag explains to search engines the URL to be indexed, its last modified date, how frequently this page changes, and what is the priority of this webpage to be indexed again.

Meta Robots Tag

When search engines visit any webpage, they look for this meta robot tag. This tag directs them if they are allowed to index this webpage or not. Below is a sample of how the meta robots tag looks like.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

The above tag will revoke all visiting search engines from indexing that webpage where it presents.

Note: If a webpage does not have a meta robot tag, that page will be treated as "index, follow" by default.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt, located in the root directory of a website, is a powerful method to allow or disallow search engines from indexing a website on a massive level.

For instance, if you want your website not to be crawled by any search engine, the first method is to embed the meta noindex tag (explained above) throughout the entire website. That could be a little hectic, and there would be chances of skipping some webpages if the website is not dynamic. But with robots.txt, just 2 lines will do the job for you.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

You may be wondering why someone would ever want to prevent indexing of their website. Well, there can be instances when indexing of webpages can be harmful for a website, especially if the website is in development process.

Other Approaches that Help in Indexing at Page Level

Below mentioned techniques help in indexing a website at the page level:

• Pings to Search Engines: You can also send pings to search engines that a new webpage has appeared on your website and request them to index them. “Fetch as Google” is an example of such pings.

• Internal and/or External Links: Search engines also index webpages when they are being linked from other locations.