Indexing

Indexing is the middle step of three, and mixing them up is what costs owners the most time. First Google crawls, which simply means a program visits your page and reads it. Then it indexes that page, keeping a copy and filing it under the subjects it found there. Only after that comes ranking, which decides where your page sits against everyone else's. A page that was never indexed cannot rank at all, because it is not in the list Google searches through.

Those three steps happen quickly and out of sight, so most owners never watch them, though a simple check exists. Search Google for your own web address and look at what comes back, because if your pages appear there they are indexed. If a site that has been live for months returns almost nothing, something is holding the door shut.

The most common cause is a single word that somebody forgot to remove. A page can carry a hidden instruction called noindex, which asks Google to forget it. Developers add it on purpose while a site is being built, so half-finished pages stay out of sight. Somebody has to take it off on launch day, and sometimes nobody does, which is how a whole site sits invisible for a year. That one line is the first thing Linkysoft looks at when a client says the visitors never arrived.

The second cause is a file called robots.txt, which tells search programs where they are not allowed to go. Block one folder there and every page inside it drops out, including the ones you sell from. The third cause is quieter, because Google can read a page, decide it adds nothing to what already exists, and keep no copy. Three lines under a product photo is rarely enough, and copying the maker's description word for word makes it worse.

Getting back in is never instant, which is why the problem is better avoided than fixed. You can ask for another look through Search Console, Google's free tool for site owners, though it may still take weeks. Clean addresses, real text on every page and links from the home page all help, which is why indexing is decided while a site is being designed and built. On a large catalogue it becomes a real engineering problem, so Linkysoft raises it in the first meeting for any web application holding thousands of pages. Before you accept a new site from anyone, ask to see one of its pages in Google a week after launch.