How To Get Your Site Indexed Before Launch & Why It Matters
Are you planning to launch a new website? If so, your first step in getting traffic is to get your site indexed on search engines like Google. This allows your target audience to find you sooner rather than later on relevant searches.
This article looks at the many reasons why you should get your site indexed as soon as possible and some ways to do it.
Why is fast search engine indexing important?
There are many good reasons to have your website indexed in search engines or on specific pages before it is officially launched.
They include:
- You want PR people like journalists, bloggers and influencers to find you on the day of publication so they know where to link and which website to share. (If you have competitors with similar names or non-competitors with similar domains, the journalist may be linking to the wrong site.)
- Your website needs to be rendered and indexed properly to attract new customers through search engines. By being indexed before launch, you can check the cache and troubleshoot problems. (Some spiders do this too, but I always prefer to use the search engine when I can.)
- Launches mean high advertising spend, and you want the customers you pay for to get attention so they can find you easily.
- If the new product or category pages aren’t indexed, consumers will need to go through your homepage or search function and add additional steps to your conversion funnel.
- New websites can take weeks to be fully indexed. By this time, the “novelty” of your business has already faded.
How long does it take to get indexed by Google?
According to Google Advanced SEO documentation, crawling can take anywhere from four days to four weeks.
In an #AskGooglebot session with John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, he answers how long SEO takes for new pages.
Mueller begins with two disclaimers: Google does not guarantee that all web pages will be indexed and that not everything that is indexed will be shown to search users.
He goes on to say that it can take anywhere from hours to several weeks for a new page to be published on the web before it is indexed. He “guesses” that the most appropriate content will be indexed within a week.
So how do we get search engines to start indexing our websites?
Request indexing from Google
Google Search Console offers site owners several ways to let Google know about a new site and ensure the most important pages are crawled and indexed. You can start by submitting a sitemap and creating a robots.txt file.
You can also ask Google to crawl your URLs using the URL inspection tool. They point out that indexing can take up to a week or two.
Notify Bing of new website content
Editor’s note: Like Google, Bing offers a number of tools to help website owners get their website on Bing’s radar. This includes their IndexNow protocol. It allows website owners to instantly notify search engines about new website content.
According to IndexNow.org,
“…it can take days to weeks for search engines to realize that the content has changed because search engines don’t often crawl every URL. With IndexNow, search engines are instantly aware of the ‘URLs that have changed, which helps them prioritize crawling for those URLs and thereby limit organic crawling to discover new content.’”
Tweet a link to your new website
Google searches Twitter at lightning speed. twitters help center notes that:
“Remember that the words you write on your Twitter profile or public tweets may be indexed by Google and other search engines and may result in your profile or tweets appearing in a search for those terms.”
In 2015, Google started indexing tweets to show them in search results.
If you have a Twitter account and tweets show up when you google your name, try tweeting the link and see if Google crawls your tweets to your site.
Get links from Google Discover
An underused method of getting indexed is backlinks from pages crawled by “discover” and “refresh”.
- Discover is Google’s new content discovery spider.
- Refresh is the bot Google uses to refresh the content in its indexes.
Once you have a blogger or website owner giving you a backlink or two, see if they sign up with Search Console.
In the settings area you can download a list of the URLs that are crawled by Google and when they are crawled.
Find the pages that are crawled the most and ask for the link from those pages. Instructions for accessing the crawl statistics feature can be found here.
Additional search indexing tips
You should also check a few things before the search engines reach your site to make sure they are indexing your most important pages.
- Your robots.txt file should disallow duplicate pages, site search results, and parameter-based URLs such as variants.
- The sitemap is listed in robots.txt and in Search Console and contains only self-canonical URLs.
- Once you exit staging, the meta robots tag has been updated to encourage indexing and tracking through the use of “Index, Follow”.
- You have no code other than metadata and resources to load the page in your website’s head – that means excess scripts, plugins, tracking tools, etc.
- Test a spider as a Googlebot or Bingbot and see how it crawls your website. There are a ton of options, including free ones.
- Test “live URLs” in Search Console to make sure they display properly and don’t encounter any errors.
- You have internal links to direct the spiders to your most important pages within the content, the main site navigation and the breadcrumbs.
Conclusion
It can be scary to request indexing and leak your introduction, but would you rather have journalists and clients find your competitors against you and risk losing money and backlinks?
If you don’t index your website before launch, it can take a few weeks for consumers to find you in search engines. Anyone who shows up for your brand or name can win your customers over.
More resources:
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