What is Indexability?
Introduction
Indexability is the facility that Google or another search engine has to correctly track our website, specifically the content that we want to be indexed and that it be categorized and filed correctly by the search engine according to the terms and topics we want.
This indexing is the foundation of a good SEO strategy. It is fundamental because even if we make a great content marketing strategy and generate many incoming links. Our website will not get a good position in search engines if the indexing of its pages is not optimized. So that is why we must ensure that our website can be crawled and indexed correctly.
A fundamental and free tool for our SEO strategy is Google Search Console. In it, we can obtain more information about how we are indexed (Indexability). Google index section, you will see the indexing status of our website in more detail. In the example, you can see the total of indexed pages and those we have blocked by robots.
Google Index Status
To improve how our website is crawled and indexed by Google (and other search engines). It is essential to review and work on the following aspects:
Configuration Robots.Txt Improves Indexability
When a website is launched, we must verify that we have the robots.txt file correctly configured. This is a small text file hosted at our site’s root. In it, we can configure that access to all the spiders that search engines use to track our website is blocked.
Google crawls the entire website based on the robots.txt guidelines. A common mistake is not unblocking the web for search engines after finishing the development stage.
To verify if the robots.txt file is configured correctly, we can see this file in Google Search Console (we have already mentioned that it is a fundamental Google tool in any SEO strategy implementation).
Example of robot txt in google search console this example, we have a robot that allows the crawling of any search engine spider on the entire website except in the WordPress administration area.
So in the robots.txt file, we could block the tracking of the other regions we want to hide so that they are not indexed by Google or another search engine.
Optimize URL Structures
Having a good URL structure is very important. It can prevent content duplication problems and allow accurate tracking of our website.
Using terms in the explanatory addresses is interesting for a suitable URL structure. Then, we can use the friendly URL creation tools that most e-commerce and content managers have to form correct URLs.
If your website generates URLs dynamically, make sure they are indexable. Keep in mind that Google has difficulty indexing addresses (URLs) that appear in navigations that are created dynamically.
Be careful with the URLs generated based on dynamic search engines within the website. The Google spider does not do these manual actions that users carry out, so you should manually index some URLs by creating a sitemap. If you do not do so, Google will not index these URLs.
Try to minimize the use of variables in the URLs since indexing them can generate multiple indexing of the same page where only the variables vary. With this, you run the risk that Google understands that you have duplicate content, and your website will be penalized.
Redirects
When we migrate content or create a new website that replaces a previous version of it, it is essential that we correctly configure the earlier URLs to the new ones to prevent your page from losing positioning.
If we do not do this. We will have multiple contents not found errors because search engine spiders still index the previous addresses.
Sitemap – Indexability
An efficient tool to submit content to Google is the use of sitemaps. A sitemap is a code in XML format that indicates to Google which pages of our website, along with other information, we can configure to our liking.
To submit a sitemap to Google, upload it to the root of your website. Then, you can submit it directly for processing if you’re using Google Search Console. To do this in the application.
We have to go to the tracking section and, through the sitemap page, check our sitemaps and send a new one. In addition, in this section, we can also see the indexing status (Indexability) of the URLs we sent from Google Search Console.
These tactics are essential for an excellent start to your SEO strategy. Making sure that there are no problems with my website being tracked by search engine spiders is going to be essential for the rest of the actions that we do later to improve the positioning of my business on the Internet.
