What Is Google Index?

What is Google Index? If you’ve paid for a website for your business, understanding the basic ‘what’ and ‘how’ of Google Index is an essential. We’ll explain all in our QUICK READ guide.

In short: Google Index is a large database that Google uses to store information on each website that has been ‘scanned’ by Google before it is added to search results.

 

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What is web crawling?

Web crawling means following links as a path through your site. When bots visit your site, other linked pages are linked.
Sitemaps include all your links on your blog, and one reason sitemaps are made is due to the linking of other pages when bots visit sites.
The bots from Google are able to utilize sitemaps to search the site deeply. Google tracks your site when they visit it which is carried out by Google’s Spider crawler, and the results are placed in the Google index after web crawling is done.  Google crawls and indexes web pages according to the meta tag you used.

Why are Google index and web crawling important?

Google indexing and crawling is imperative for the entire web. This is especially true for search engine optimization purposes. A site simply doesn’t exist in search engines if there hasn’t been any web crawling, and it isn’t in the index. So, the next time a potential visitor searches for information on your site, this person wouldn’t get the information returned in the search engine results page (SERP) which is the list of results returned from the search engine when responding to a keyword query.
To the search engine, your site, or some pages on your site, will not exist when the site, or some pages of the site, isn’t indexed.

How to check if my site is indexed by Google?

With Google index, you don’t have to ask ” is my site being indexed by Google”.  You can check to see whether or not the site is indexed. This is a fairly easy process where you just type in “site:url” as the website address on Google. The number of indexed pages from your site will be displayed.
Also, to ensure your site is indexed properly, you must create a sitemap first which will contain your site’s pages and its structure. Web crawlers will easily access your site’s data, and your site’s overall indexing is improved. Then, a robots.txt file must be created to easily guide the web crawlers in your website’s structure. Crawlers will know what information to gather. There will also be better results in SERP and eventually with your popularity and income.

What is Google Index Status and why does it matter?

The Google Index Status is actually the proper term that many people commonly misconceived as searching the web. The Google Index Status works the same way as the library’s organizing once was. When looking for a book at the library back in the day, you had to search the card catalog for a book on a certain subject. However, you won’t be able to find a book in the library if there is no such card in the card catalog.
The Google Index Status works similarly to this library process. Google clicks on links each hour daily to observe where the links go.  The process is repeated over again until they presumably reach every site containing links to other sites.  Information about the site is sent back to Google as the spiders crawl through the web. The information is stored in the index, and the Google algorithm ranks the best results in regards to keywords and search engine rankings.

Performing a Google Index checker

There are various ways to check your Google Index status. One way is to type in “Google index checker” on the subject line on Google’s search engine and use one of the search engine results for the Google Index Checker.  On searchenginereports.net, for instance, you must scroll down to and click on “Google Index checker”. You can obtain the status of five URLs.  Then, you must type/paste in the URL and click on “check”. The index URL and status will return showing the value range from zero to 100 and as indexed or not indexed, respectively.

Other ways to perform Google Index checker include the following:

  • Submit URL to Google search engine– by visiting Google’s site for URL submission on your browser, type in your URL. You will go through the verifying process showing that you are human and not a robot. Then once done, you must click “Add URL”.  Their Webmaster Tools can also be used for submitting your URL.
  • Submit the site to search engines– just typing in other search engines, such as Ask, Yahoo, and Bing, will show the results. Since 2010, Bing has powered Yahoo, and Ask only crawls sites now.

What is a good Google Index number?

When you check the status of the Google Index, the higher the values, the better the Google Index number is.  As traffic builds on your site, Google will begin to rank your site. So, you must continue to monitor and work on increasing your index number which will take time.

You can also check a Google crawler test to determine how your site is fairing on Google. You can type “Google crawler test” on the search engines and choose one of the sites to check how Google sees your site.  Google also offers Webmaster tools on this subject matter.

Summary: A vital element for a successful website

Checking and maintaining a good Google Index is vital for a successful site.

Understanding the basics of Google indexing and crawling means you can apply the right steps to gain more relevance, popularity and income over time.

Good luck!

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