What is Indexing in SEO?

All major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. SEO is the process of getting traffic from the free, organic, editorial or natural search results on search engines.

What is Indexing?

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 being displayed in search engines against user queries.

Getting Indexed

The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Google offers Google Search Console, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links in addition to their URL submission console.Yahoo! formerly operated a paid submission service that guaranteed to crawl for a cost per click, however, this practice was discontinued in 2009.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index.

Before we leave

Since search engine algorithms change frequently and SEO tactics evolve in response to those changes. So if someone is offering you SEO advice that doesn't feel quite right, check in with Search Engine World before you proceed.