How do search engines index your website?

How do the search engines find you?

There are several ways to get the search engine bots to index your website.

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.
- Use Bing’s Webmaster Tools to crawl your website along with many other tools to help you market your website.
Following Links from Other Websites
Sitemaps

How is the bot’s information indexed?

After the search engine robots are sent to your website to crawl information, the information is gathered and examined by your keyword phrases, website structure, content, website freshness, domain age, schema information, how website visitors interact with your website, and many other things then it goes back to the search engine to categorize it then it lets its algorithm determine where to put your website in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Indexing a website is one of the first steps in determining how to rank it.

After the information is processed it is categorized with trillions (yes, trillions with a capital ‘T’) of other websites to categorize it like the old library card catalog that you used back in the day.

Once the information is categorized it determines where to place it in ranking with the other websites online by determining its ranking via the search engine’s own algorithm.

The higher the competition on the category (theme) of your website or your website’s page the harder it is to be displayed higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Google has purchased an AI (Artificial Intelligence) company to help understand and determine the searcher’s intent on what they are trying to search for online so that they can do the best job possible in sending you the information that you are requesting near the top of the SERPs so you don’t have to look very hard.

In the past, Microsoft Live Search brought back poor search results. In fact, back then 80% of the ads were clicked while only 20% of the organic listings were clicked while at Google 20% of the ads were clicked while 80% of the organic listings were clicked.

Since then, Microsoft Live Search was rebranded to Bing and its search results have gotten much better and the ratio of clicks between ads and organic listings has also gotten much better rivaling close to Google for accuracy. This is what prompted Google to purchase the AI company to get even better results.

Once all of the indexing data is in the search engines determine how to place it in front of you via its own search engine algorithm.

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