Google Search Console

If a blog post gets posted on the internet, but no one see it, does it even exist?

Chances are if your new blog post isn’t getting any views, it’s because Google hasn’t posted it yet. Even so, that existential dread you are feeling is all too real.

The sad truth is that Google doesn’t index your site every day or each time you update an item. Instead, that new brilliant blog or the changes you made go into a queue. If you have a smaller website or if you’re a small business, you can expect to wait a while before those changes are visible. In fact, it can sometimes take months after you publish a new blog post for Google to naturally find it, index it, and put it into their search results. Frustrating, right?

The delayed gratification solution.

But what if we told you that there is a tool out there that can quickly index your website? That it’s like picking up the phone, calling Google and saying, “Hey, I published a new blog! Will you come and index my site?” This tool exists and it’s called Google Search Console.

Indexing Made Easy

The Google Search Console allows you to easily request that Google index your site. After your request, Google will put your post or site into a much faster queue, so that your new post can start getting views.

Each time you publish a post, head over to Google Search Console. Once you log in, you’re going to see a whole bunch of stats. Don’t let that overwhelm you. Instead, focus only on the URL Inspection Tool.

What the URL Inspection tool Does

The URL Inspection tool is a handy tool indeed. Among other things, it allows you to:

• Check the index status of a URL. Here, you’ll be able to get information on why Google has or has not indexed your page.
• Request indexing for a URL. If you posted a new URL, you can request that it be crawled. Also, if you adjusted something on one of your already existing URLs, you can request Google to recrawl it.
• View a page. You’ll be able to see a screenshot of how Googlebot sees it.
• Troubleshoot a missing page. If your page hasn’t been indexed, the URL Inspection tool can help you figure out why.

I’m down! How do I do this?

The URL Inspection tool will highlight the little bar on the top of the screen. If you copy and paste your new blog post address in that bar, you’re going to discover that the URL is not on Google. That’s because you’ve searched for a brand new post. Google has no idea that you posted something new. Fear not. All you need to do is submit your request and Search Console will start the indexing process!

Get Your Index Game On

Requesting indexing is worth doing every time you publish a new page, update your homepage, make large updates, add or remove sections, or clean up your titles and meta descriptions. If you need to index a big set of pages, try to do a couple per day to get through your site.

As a fair warning, it may take Google a while to index your changes, especially if you have a huge set of URLs to do. However, you can also request an index of your entire site. If you’re launching a new website, or if you’ve made changes to a ton of pages, you can request the root–or home page–and Google will crawl all the links associated with it. Once submitted, your site goes into the priority crawl queue!

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to learn more about how to structure URLs so Google can more easily index them, check out our blog “Why Your URL Blog Structure Matters.” As always, if you’re suffering existential dread about other digital marketing issues, contact us. We love to solve digital problems.