How can I get my website indexed and ranked faster?

Here are several ways to get your website crawled and indexed faster by the search engines.

Ask Them

Go to Google Search Console and click on the search bar at the top that says ‘Inspect Any URL’ and enter your website address there. This will check to see if your website is on Google or not and you can request indexing.

Use Bing’s IndexNow that websites can call to notify Bing whenever website contents on any URL are updated or created allowing instant crawling, and discovery of the URL. There is an IndexNow WordPress Plugin for this as well.

Create an Account

Creating an account with the search engines will get their attention faster.

You can create an account with Google by visiting Google Search Console where there are many tools that will help index your website, find crawlability issues that your website may have, and monitor UX (User Experience) with tools like page load speed, what you rank for already, etc.

You can also create an account with Bing by signing up with Bing Webmaster Tools where you can get tools similar to the ones found in Google Search Console.

Update Your Content

If the content changes more frequently then the search engine bots will also visit your website more frequently. Here is an example.

If Googlebot visits www.yourwebsite.com in January and indexes all of the content on the website it will schedule itself to return in two weeks. When the Googlebot visits back in two weeks and sees the content has not changed it will schedule itself not to return again for a month. Then after it returns in a month and sees that no content change has been made it will schedule not to come back until even longer.

Why does it do this? To help save time and money on resources by avoiding unnecessary tasks. There are over 900,000 servers working at Google and they index over 1 Trillion websites. In order to put more resources on websites that change their content more frequently it takes time away from websites that do not.

This means that if you finally made a change on your website and if Googlebot is not scheduled to return for another month it may take that long for it to index and crawl your website.

On the other hand, if your website changes its content more frequently the search engine bots will schedule to return more frequently.

What is the fastest I ever got a website to rank?

The fastest that I ever got a website to rank was less than 5 minutes. I must have made the changes just before Googlebot was scheduled to return and it had crawled, indexed, and ranked that website in less than 5 minutes.

Links From Other Websites

If you happen to be on the list where your website is not visited for a month or more you can speed up this process by having links (called backlinks) from other websites that point to yours.

Let me explain. Say you just added a great article to your website but the search engine is not scheduled to crawl your website with its bot for another month what do you do?

You can contact another website about your article and ask them to link to it from their website. That way when the search engine bot crawls and indexes their website they will find that link and follow it to your website to start crawling and indexing your website. Not only that it also helps boost the ranking of your website in the process.

But when will that other website get crawled and indexed? Unless you monitor the traffic of bots on the website you will not know. Will it be in one day, one week, or one month? You do not know how frequently the bots visit that website.

If you have links to your website from many other websites the likelihood of getting your website crawled and indexed increases more with the more websites that link to yours.

Quick ideas on getting faster indexing to your website is to submit your new content to press releases, ask websites to link to your website, post links to your new content on social media sites, list in directories, etc.

Add a sitemap to your website

To save time search engine bots will look for a sitemap on the website first to speed up the process. A sitemap gives the search engines a list of all the pages on your site along with details about it that include when it was last modified.

But unfortunately, if the bot is not scheduled to return for some time this will not help much.

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Related Content:

How do search engines crawl your website?
What is a robots.txt file?
How do search engines index your website?
What is a sitemap?
How do search engines rank your website?