Instant Indexing in Google: How to Submit Your Website to Google?

Instant Indexing in Google is what every website owner is aspiring to in order to  make it easy and quick for search engines users to find them.

A fast or instant Indexing in Google can only happen through submitting one’s website URL to google.

The question now is: How can you submit your site for that fast or instant indexing in Google? And, do you really need to do it?

Throughout this guide, you’ll be able to learn:

• How to submit your site to Google
• How to submit each of your URLs to Google
• Why you should submit your website to Google
• How fast will Google index your website
• Why Google may not index your website

Ways to Submitting a Website for a Fast or Instant Indexing in Google

To submit a website for a fast or “instant” indexing in Google, there are two ways. You can either submit your sitemap URL by using Google’s “ping” service or you can submit it directly in Google Search Console. These two options are completely free and can take only seconds.

How to Find Your Sitemap

Before you can proceed with your submission using either of these two options, you’ll have to firstly find your sitemap URL. How to find it or create one will depend on your website platform.

For those using WordPress, go ahead and install any of the following free SEO plugins: Rank Math, The SEO Framework, or Yoast. Anyone of them can help you generate sitemaps for you. It will be located here:

Yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml

For those using Squarespace, Shopify, or Wix, the website sitemap will be here:

Yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.

For those using CMS or any other different platform, chances are they create a sitemap for you. Most likely, your sitemap location will be here:

Yoursite.com/sitemap1.xml

Yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you don’t find it there, however, maybe you can find it listed at Yoursite.com/robots.txt.

In case you’re not using a platform or CMS, maybe you’ll have to create a sitemap manually. However, do make sure you have fully checked the URLs above first, as you might already have one.

Now that you have your sitemap ready, it’s time to submit it to Google.

To do so, you have one of these two options.

Option N°1: Submitting Sitemaps in Google Search Console

1. Firstly, Log in to your Google Search Console account.
2. Then, go to the right property.
3. On the left menu, Click “Sitemaps”.
4. Copy-paste in your sitemap URL(s).
5. Click “Submit”.

Submitting your sitemap in Google Search Console is considered the best way to go as Google Search Console will be alerting you to any possible sitemap error(s) in the future. Also, it will provide you with precious insights about your site’s health, including reasons why certain pages cannot be indexed etc.

Option N°2: Submitting Sitemaps by Pinging Google

Well, you can do so by using Google “ping” service. Thru this service you can prompt for a fresh crawl of your sitemap and thus get that instant indexing in Google. You can proceed as follows:

Type the following URL into your navigator and replace the last part with your sitemap URL:

http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=<complete_url_of_sitemap>

For instance, if your sitemap is found at “yoursite.com/sitemap.xml”, you type the following:

http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Then you should get the following “sitemap notification received” page.

Google states that you should use this service only with updated or new sitemaps. Do not submit or ping the same sitemap repeatedly many times.

Google URL Submission: How to Submit URLs for Fast Indexing in Google

In general, it’s not necessary to submit every new page to Google as long as you have a sitemap already submitted to Google with the new URLs in it. They will eventually be discovered by Google. There are two ways, however, to speed up the process.

Option N°1: Pinging for Quick Indexing In Google

The first thing to think about before trying to ping Google is to make sure your new pages are in your sitemap. After doing that, just go ahead and follow the instructions previously discussed in previous section to ping Google for a quick re-check of your sitemap. If you’re using WordPress with The SEO Framework, Rank Math, or Yoast, however, this whole process won’t be necessary as these plugins will do the job for you automatically.

Option N°2: Using Google’s URL Inspection Tool for Quick Indexing in Google

The URL Inspector Tool within Google Search Console allows you to add URLs even if your sitemap doesn’t include them (although it should).

This is how to proceed:

1. Firstly, Log in to Google Search Console Account
2. Go to the right property
3. Then, Click “URL Inspection” on the left menu
4. Copy-paste in the URL of your new page
5. Hit “return”
6. Click at “Request indexing”

There’s nothing wrong with doing this if you only have a couple of new pages. Some people think it accelerates indexing. This process is not recommended if you want to submit many new pages to Google. This is a waste of time and you will be stuck there for hours. Instead, use the first option.

Do you Really Need to Submit your Site to Google?

Well, you kind of…

Google will find and index valuable pages even if they are not submitted. There are benefits to submitting a website to Google, however.

Before we discuss these benefits, let’s first talk about how Google does find and index your content.

Google Finding and Indexing Your Content

The process of finding and indexing your content by Google goes through four main steps described as follows:

Step N°1: Discovery

Discovery is the way Google knows that your website does exist. Google knows about most websites and pages by the help of sitemaps and backlinks on known pages.

Step N°2: Crawling

Crawling is simply the process of visiting and downloading your website pages by a computer program known as Googlebot.

Step N°3: Processing

Processing describes the step when crawled pages are being analyzed and prepared for indexing by Google.

Step N°4: Indexing

Indexing happens when the processed information from your crawled pages are added to the search index which is a big database of trillions of webpages from which Google pulls its search results.

What Makes Submitting your Website to Google an Important Step?

As the previously mentioned steps are carried out in order, through submitting your website to Google, you just help speed up the first part of the indexing process which is the “Discovery”.

You know, this whole process is like a journey, the earlier you start, the quicker you will arrive at your destination. This time: indexing.

There are, moreover, a couple of other reasons that make submitting your sitemap important too.

1. This Helps Google Know About your Important Pages

The fact is that not all your website pages are always included in your Sitemap. They exclude duplicate and unimportant pages and do list only important ones. By doing this, Google combats issues like the indexing of the wrong version of a page because of duplicate content issues.

2. This Helps Google Know About your New Pages

Submitting your sitemap helps Google know about your new pages and thus, this helps save time having to submit manually each new one.

3. This Helps Google Know About your Orphan Pages

Published pages on your website without internal links from other pages are known as orphan pages. The problem is that Google cannot discover them thru crawling without backlinks from known pages on other sites. Therefore, submitting your sitemap will solve this issue as orphan pages are included usually in your sitemap—well, at least those created by a CMS.

How Long Will Google Take Indexing Your Content?

Google states that the crawling process can take from a few days up to a couple of weeks. (Put in your mind that crawling is always and almost a prerequisite to website indexing.)

In my experience, crawling takes no more than a week or two unless you have a large website.

No worries if it goes a bit more than that, however. That’s perfectly normal.

Why Google Isn’t Indexing All of your Content?

Google may not index every URL you submit. There are many possible reasons for this, but here are some of the most common ones:

1. Crawling Is Blocked on your Website

On all websites, there is a text file known as “Robots.txt” in charge of enabling or blocking Google from crawling your URLs/pages.

For instance, the following robots.txt file will block Google from crawling all the pages on your website:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Rarely but it’s possible that you’ll come across some Urls that are indexed by Google even if it cannot crawl them but as I said it’s quite rare. Blocking crawling will stop Google from extracting much information about the page in question. Therefore, it may not rank despite being indexed.

One of the benefits of submitting your website thru Google Search Console is the possibility for you to know about these pages that are excluded from indexing because of crawl blocks.

Here is how to you can check it out:

1. Firstly Log in to your Google Search Console Account
2. Select the correct property
3. On the left menu, Click “Coverage”

In there, toggle the “Excluded” tab and do check for these three issues:

• Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt
• Blocked by robots.txt
• Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt

2. Your Important Pages Are “Noindexed”

X-robots-header or Meta robots tag on pages with “noindex” in the content attribute will block Google from indexing them.

If your website is already crawled, you can check for your “noindexed” pages in the “Coverage” report in Google Search Console. Go ahead and toggle the “Excluded” and “Error” tabs, and then check for these two issues:

• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
• Submitted URL tagged ‘noindex’

In case your website hasn’t been crawled yet, or you just want to keep up-to-date with “noindex tags”, you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT). You’ll be able then to run a free check for your website using Site Audit. This free check will come up with all your SEO issues including your “noindexed” pages.

3. Your Website Contains Low-Value Pages

The chances that Google is going to index your webpages which are without much value to searchers are very low. According to a tweet from Google’s John Mueller, in order for a content to be indexed, it should be “awesome and inspiring”.

After making sure there are no technical issues behind your indexing problem, you have to review the quality of your published content. If it’s of low quality, then that’s probably why it’s not indexed.

To check for your webpages that are low-value and for any possible similar pages published on your website, you can proceed with a free website crawl check with the help of “Site Audit” in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. This detects two issues linked often with low-value content:

1. Webpages with low wording counts
2. Webpages that are near or exact -duplicates

The number of URLs having low word counts can be found in the “All issues” report.

Despite the fact that a lengthy content doesn’t necessarily mean valuable, a webpage with very low word counts isn’t often that valuable for searchers. Therefore, such webpages should be reviewed manually and made more useful where necessary.

Webpages that are exact or near duplicates are to be found in the Duplicate Content report:

Here are two low-value webpages that we can qualify as near-duplicates:

These are two empty category webpages featuring no products, which makes them useless for searchers. The website owner should, in this case, either improve or just remove them.

The take-home Message

Fast or instant indexing in Google doesn’t necessarily mean a high ranking for your targeted keywords. It just means that you are in the race. Winning is another thing, however.

Winning comes along with your SEO efforts to put in. Ranking high in SERPS will depend on your website optimization and the amount of traffic you get from a search engine’s organic results which is in this case: Google.

Recommended reading: How to Submit Your Website to all search engines (Google, Bing…)

(Featured Image Credit(free) : Niilo Isotalo / unsplash photos)

 

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