What is Crawling and Indexing?
If your website or page is not showing up for any related search queries or a page of your website is still not visible, then it might be concluded that Google has not indexed your website. Crawling and indexing are also important factors in SEO.
Like suppose, If you have a website page that is not indexed then your page will not appear on any related search queries and you will not get any organic traffic to your site. Let me make it more clear about what is crawling and indexing.
What is Crawling and Indexing?
Have you ever think of how Google gets to know about each and every page on the internet produced on a daily basis. Internet is a web. And so, Google finds new pages by crawling the web. Now the question is how do they crawl the complete web.
They do it using Google bots or we can say that with the help of web spiders. A Google bot follows hyperlinks on the web to discover each new page, this is what crawling is called.
Now if google bot is crawling various hyperlinks in a contiguous way, then there must be a database to store all these crawled pages. Now that’s what indexing is, crawling of each page and then storing it for the further request is known as indexing.
But always remember indexing and ranking are two different factors. Indexing is responsible for rankings but ranking cannot be considered as a factor responsible for indexing.
There is a way by you can check that if your website or any of it’s page is indexed or not? Let’s see how:
Open your browser and search Google, then in the search bar type site:yourwebsite.com
See how this works, in the above image for my A2ZGyaan website it shows about 48 results which means these are roughly the number of pages that have been indexed by Google.
And If your website is not indexed then no results will appear on Google.
Moreover, you can also check the indexing of a specific URL. Just do the same process as we have done above and it will show the results for that particular URL.
There’s also the other way for checking if your website page is indexed or not and that is through Google Search Console. It is free for every user. You can sign up, verify your property (website) using different methods.
See how it works:
Search on Google: Search Console or Webmaster tools
Open Search Console and a dashboard will appear like this:
On the top left corner where I have marked black, from there you can add your property and verify it. Remember you cannot directly add a property to Search Console, you have to verify your ownership. Like this:
By following those steps, you can verify your property and use the Search Console for free.
Coming back to the topic: How can you check if your pages are indexed in Search Console. This is how you can do it by following these simple steps:
After verifying your property, click on URL inspection tool on the left menu bar or paste your URL on the top middle Search bar with the placeholder “Inspect your URL”.
Just paste the URL and hit enter, the results will appear like this:
If your page is got indexed by Google, then it will say “URL is on Google” otherwise “URL is not on Google”.
Now, I think this could have been much easier for you to check if your pages are indexed or not.
If you find any other method (I guess possibly not), then please do share in the comment box.
