We repeat on our blog, in our exchanges with our clients or in training that quality SEO referencing is a long-term job, sometimes there are things that cannot wait!
What could be more infuriating, for example, than an extremely important new page that is slow to be indexed by Google after being published on the web? For all those whose activity is sometimes subject to topical constraints, such an indexing problem on a page can, every day, cause business opportunities to be missed. Ditto for important updates that Google would be slow to reindex.
Sometimes, a SEO delay can come from technical errors on non-indexed pages. But it also happens that Google (and even more often other search engines) take several days or even weeks to index a new page or re-index an updated version of a page in its search results. Suffice to say that a new “Black Friday” page indexed on December 15 can cause some frustration…
To avoid this, the best thing to do is of course to optimize all of your natural referencing. It is in particular by regularly publishing new content, by taking care of the loading speed of your pages (in particular their loading on mobile) and their UX in general, by using short and readable URLs or by increasing the authority of your website that you will encourage Google’s indexing robots to visit your website more often.
That said, there are some actions that can help speed up the process in the most urgent cases. Here are our top 7 tips for pleasing a Google bot:
Summary
- Upload a sitemap file
- Use your site’s internal architecture
- Submit page in Search Console
- Push the page with backlinks
- Go through Ping sites
- Share the page on social networks
- Recycle an old page already indexed
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Why is it important to speed up the indexing of new pages on Google?
- What is the first action to take to speed up the indexing of new pages?
- What other actions can help speed up the indexing of new pages?
Upload a sitemap file
Surely you have already seen this “sitemap” or “site map” mention, which webmasters often place in the footer of the page and save in the Search Console. It generally points to an XML file which is intended to help the crawling robots of Google (and other search engines) to find the different pages of a website more quickly in order to index them.
Sometimes, in the case of sites that have several tens of thousands of pages, it may even be interesting to create several sitemaps to segment everything. It is for example possible to provide a specific site map, for images, another for news, one for videos, etc.
Concretely, the organization of links in one or more sitemaps works like a set of recommendations for crawlers and this sometimes allows them to gain speed in exploring elements that are difficult to access in the navigation. But these recommendations will never replace the actual structure of the site, which must remain your priority in terms of page organization.
Use your site’s internal architecture
Crawlers actually use your site’s internal links to navigate from page to page. You must therefore avoid having “orphan” pages, that is to say pages which are cut off from the others and which cannot be explored from internal links. Indeed, Google will give little importance to the pages that it struggles to find and on which users cannot go naturally. However, the report is direct with possible problems of indexing of these pages, which are in fact penalized.
In the same vein, you need to pay attention to the DFI (Distance from Index), “click distance from the index” in French. Clearly, the more the number of clicks is reduced between a page and the homepage of the site, the more this page will be considered as a priority by the indexing robots. It is therefore recommended not to exceed 3 clicks from the home page to reach your important pages. Beyond that, Google is likely to consider them unimportant.
To speed up the indexing of a new page or an updated page, place it as close as possible to the homepage in your internal links. You can even place a link that points to it directly on the home page (or at least on a second level page), if only temporarily, while it is indexed.
Submit page in Search Console
You can imagine that Google has provided a feature allowing webmasters to report important content to it, which they believe should be indexed quickly. This functionality is worth what it is worth but it has in any case the merit of existing. To use it, simply go to the Search Console and access the URL submission bar via the “URL inspection” section in the left menu:
This tool allows you to ask Googlebot to go to a page not yet indexed and to follow the progress of the indexing, but it allows you more broadly to identify exploration errors and to optimize a site accordingly.
Push the page with backlinks
If you find that Google is not indexing new pages on your site quickly enough, it is probably because your site lacks authority in the eyes of the leader of search engines. However, to gain authority, you will have to go through the “backlinks” box, these URLs from other sites that point to yours.
In this case, by getting backlinks from high authority sites, you will suck up some of their authority and make your site more attractive to crawlers. But, by obtaining on a site with strong authority a backlink to content not yet indexed, you will especially benefit from the frequency of passage of Googlebot on this site which mentions you. In concrete terms, when Googlebot visits the site concerned, it is likely to take a look at the links it contains and therefore on your page to be indexed.
Go through Ping sites
Ping services are historical allies of SEO for Mobile Apps. Admittedly, their use in current web marketing tends to be more and more anecdotal, but, since we are putting all the chances on our side to quickly index a new page (note that it also works to index backlinks), we might as well take this one.
In a simplified way, pings are systems which make it possible to signal to search engines that a page has been created or updated on a site. You can “ping” your URLs by hand, sending them one by one to your favorite ping sites. But we still recommend that you use an automation tool for this, especially since WordPress integrates one directly into its settings:
By saving your list of Ping sites there, your new pages will be automatically “pinged” when they are published.
Share the page on social networks
Social networks are not always popular in the SEO world, because the backlinks they contain are “no follow” and therefore do not transmit authority in the eyes of Google (even if the notion has become secondary since March 2020). In fact, these backlinks have little interest in increasing the ability of your pages to rank on search engines.
On the other hand, links from social networks can speed up the indexing of your pages. And for good reason, these platforms are still closely followed by Google because they bring together a lot of active users. A social link to a recent page on your site actually works as a positive signal in the eyes of Googlebot. It tells him that the page is already attracting users (moreover, such a link often generates real traffic) and that there is therefore an interest in indexing it as a priority.
However, the advantage of social networks over backlinks from other websites is that you can initiate the publication. Conclusion: do not hesitate to share your content on your social pages as soon as they are published. Their indexing can only be accelerated.
Recycle an old page already indexed
This last trick is perhaps our favorite at Ad Premier, because it results from a different way of posing the problem of indexing pages… Often, when trying to quickly reference new content, it is because there is a problem of seasonality, in other words, because this content is interesting at a specific moment but will be less so after some time. Therefore, why not take advantage of the already indexed URLs of your content that has become obsolete?
For example, among our e-commerce customers, we have often seen that seasonal promotions have a new page each year. We then find Marketing for Electricians ourselves every year with new URLs to index, such as: etc. However, recycling the same page from one year to the next, while keeping its URL, makes it possible to keep its indexing and referencing power at the same time. Admittedly, this is not possible in all cases, but it is very often…
You are in any case armed with a list of actions intended to accelerate the indexing of your pages. So, you no longer have any excuses to stay for days in front of the “Sitex” command of the Google search bar, waiting for your page to appear.
But, as you will have understood, the best way to index your pages quickly is to provide real SEO work over the long term. The good news is that we did that pretty well at Ad Premier… We can even look at your data to carry out a free audit of your current strategy and its complementarity with your Ads strategy.