Importance of link indexing in SEO

An index is another name for the database used by a search engine. Indexes contain the information on all the websites that Google (or any other search engine) was able to find. If a website is not in a search engine’s index, users will not be able to find it.

 

 

Making your website accessible through link indexing is all that you need to be worried about in the first place. An accessible website means that all its target pages will be indexed and will have the opportunity to rank for your target keywords.

Here are the three main areas of focus in order to fully understand and execute technical SEO:

CRAWLING

 

The primary directive here is to make sure that all of our target pages can be crawled by the search engine bots otherwise called as google link index. Also, few websites may have pages that their owners might not want to be crawled that’s the reason we will talk only about targeted pages and how to look for potential problems.

GOOD SITE ARCHITECTURE

 

A good website architecture or navigation is not only good for search engines, it is good for users as well. To be more specific, when you want to make sure that your most important pages are easy to find, ideally within a few clicks of the homepage.

CRAWL BUDGET

 

Google only has a certain level of resources to crawl or to perform link indexing on the ever expanding web hence, they assign a crawl budget to each domain they crawl, this budget is roughly determined by the amount of PageRank a website has. While Google will try to find as much content as they can.

CONTROLLING THE CRAWL

 

One can build more quality links into their website which can help increase PageRank which is also very important

google link index:

• Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to links to pages that you do not want crawled
• Make links harder for Google to follow by making them Javascript or AJAX based – be careful here though as you want to still make them clickable for the user and Google is always getting better at crawling these technologies all the time
• Block certain sets of pages in your robots.txt file in order to stop Google from crawling them.

The goal here is not to control PageRank, but to try and control which pages your crawl budget gets used on. 

INDEXING

 

Indexing is the process of adding webpages into Google search. Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added into the web search’s index. By default, every WordPress post and page is indexed.

CACHING

 

The easiest way to check that Google is indexing a page correctly is to check the cached version and compare it to the actual version. There are three ways you can do this quickly.

• Run a Google search
• Click through from Google search results
• Use a bookmarklet

SITEMAP SEGMENTATION

The purpose and use of XML sitemaps is to summarize how google bots should index a website, the idea is that by creating several sitemaps for different parts of your website, you can monitor indexation using Google Webmaster Tools.

INDEX STATUS

A nice feature of Google Webmaster Tools is to identify index status. The basic view of the data shows only the total indexed value. The advanced view shows additional data. Total indexed URLs in your site. Shows the total URLs available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google might discover by other means.

RANKING

The whole reason we are going through these tasks is ultimate to get our pages ranking higher than they already are, Hence here’s what you need to do. Find out how many pages you are trying to get traffic to. This will most probably be your homepage, categories, products, and content pages. There are also a few other ways you can do this, depending on your website’s setup

• Look at the number of URLs in your sitemap (relies on sitemaps being updated and accurate)
• Speak to your developers who should be able to give you a rough idea on this matter
• You could also crawl your website but this relies on all pages being accessible in the first place hence follow the steps in “cashing”

Once you have this number, you need to check how many of these pages are getting organic traffic. You can do this using Google Analytics.