Story Based Question
You’ve just finished setting up a beautiful new website for your handmade jewelry business. You’ve optimized all the images, written great content, and made sure your site loads fast. But despite all this, you’re not seeing much traffic coming from Google. After digging deeper, you realize that your pages aren’t showing up in search results. You’ve heard the term indexability, but what does it really mean? Why is it important for SEO, and how does it affect whether or not your website shows up in Google search?
Exact Answer
Indexability refers to the ability of search engines to index the content on your website, meaning it’s stored in their database and can appear in search results. It’s important for SEO because if your pages aren’t indexable, search engines can’t include them in search results, limiting your site’s visibility.
Explanation
Indexability is all about making sure your website’s pages are accessible for search engines to store and display in their search results. After search engines crawl your website (discover and read the pages), they need to index those pages. This process involves adding the pages to the search engine’s database so they can appear in search results when relevant queries are made.
For SEO, indexability is crucial because if your pages are not indexed, they won’t appear in search engine results, meaning no one can find them via organic search. Here’s how to ensure good indexability:
- Ensure proper use of robots.txt: A misconfigured robots.txt file can block crawlers from indexing your pages. Make sure that important pages are not accidentally blocked by this file.
- Use meta tags correctly: The meta robots tag controls whether a page should be indexed. Ensure you don’t have pages marked with
noindex, unless you really don’t want them to appear in search results. - Submit a sitemap: A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. By submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you help search engines find and index your pages more quickly.
- Fix broken links and redirects: Broken links or pages that return 404 errors can prevent search engines from properly indexing your content. Use a site audit tool to identify and fix any issues.
- Create high-quality content: Content-rich pages that are well-organized and provide value are more likely to be indexed and ranked by search engines. Avoid thin content (pages with little useful information), which can be ignored by search engines.
- Ensure mobile-friendliness: Since Google uses mobile-first indexing, it’s vital that your website is mobile-friendly. A non-mobile-friendly website can hinder the indexing process and hurt your SEO rankings.
Example
Imagine you run a handmade jewelry store online, and you’ve just added a new collection to your website. You want these new product pages to show up in Google’s search results. However, after some time, you notice they aren’t being indexed.
- You first check your robots.txt file and realize it was blocking search engines from crawling your product pages. You update the file to allow crawlers access to these pages.
- Next, you check the meta tags on your product pages. You find that the “noindex” tag was mistakenly added. You remove the tag so Google can index these pages.
- You submit an updated sitemap to Google Search Console, ensuring that your new product pages are listed for indexing.
- During a site audit, you discover a few broken links on your homepage that may be preventing search engines from crawling deeper into your site. You fix these links to ensure that crawlers can reach all the important pages.
- Lastly, you test your site’s mobile-friendliness using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and fix any issues that arise.
After making these updates, you check again, and within a few days, your new product pages are indexed by Google. They start appearing in search results, driving more customers to your online jewelry store.
Indexability is essential for SEO because, without it, search engines can’t rank your pages, and your site won’t show up in search results. By ensuring that your pages are properly indexed, you increase your chances of ranking higher in search results and getting more organic traffic.