When marketers spend time and a considerable amount of money building a website, it can be challenging to see it through the eyes of Google or users. This is why it is important to step back and consider how to get Google to crawl your site. The first order of business is for Google to find your website. Why not go the extra mile and create a sitemap and submit the website to Google Webmaster Tools? Marketers can also petition Google to index their website on Google’s URL submission page.
Keep in mind that Google cannot see anything that robots.txt blocks. This is a plain text file containing code that tells Google what to look at on a page and what not to look at. Google will overlook directories, pages, or files that you disallow. Google will clearly follow your instructions in this matter. If marketers fail to create a robots.txt file, Google crawler tools have the go-ahead to index the entire website. While that might seem fine at first, there may be parts of a website that you do not want Google to crawl. A robots.txt file can also block off parts of a website where there may be duplicate content.
How to get Google to crawl your site?
Pay attention to your page titles! After examining a robots.txt file, Google looks at page titles and accompanying meta tags. Only 65 of your title tag characters will register for indexing. These same 65 characters are those which appear in SERPs. Next, Google scans your page description which is also a meta tag.
How Google Looks at Content
When Google crawlers find a webpage, they look to find keywords while examining the website’s freshness. Google’s algorithm keeps track of everything in its search index. The Google search index is an amazing storehouse of billions of webpages. The storage capacity is off the chart. A site owner can never go wrong with plenty of content. The key is to write quality content. You may also want to consider writing content of epic length each week. New, refreshed content gets Google’s attention.
Important Google Crawler Tools
Google crawler tools will check on new content if your website is on the radar. However, it is never a bad thing to give Google a little push and assistance with indexing. Just keep in mind that you can never force Google to index your site immediately.
- Start with Google’s Fetch Tool. For this, you will need a webmaster account. Once your account gets listed in Webmaster Tools, it is easy to perform a “fetch” on any URL related to that account.
- The Add URL tool is like the Fetch Tool. It is a simpler tool and a bit slower without the functionality of Fetch, but it is still worth using to your advantage.
- Always add a sitemap. This is a good idea any time you make structural changes to a site or amend a large number of pages.
Getting Familiar with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is free and can be one of the most valuable tools in your SEO toolbox. Using it enables website owners to keep an eye on numerous aspects that concern search visibility. Use it to monitor security problems, indexing errors, and how well bots crawl the site. Search Console reports the following:
- It confirms that Google is actively finding and crawling a website.
- It uncovers indexing problems and will re-index updated or refreshed content.
- It reveals how often a website appears in Google Search along with those queries that lead users to your site.
- When Google encounters spam and other similar issues, Google sends an alert.
- It can also show site owners the sites that link to their website.
- An added bonus is its ability to troubleshoot issues like mobile usability.
The ability to continually look at a website in a fresh way can help site owners to stop obsessing over old things on their website. Google tends to look at factors other than what marketers are used to looking at. With constant vigilance, marketers can start to look at their website through the eyes of Google. This can only lead to an improvement in ranking. For more advice on how to get google to crawl your site, contact us at Advanced Digital Media Services. We are an SEO company that can help your business improve its search engine ranking.
