Articles on: SEO

Site indexing

The search engines look for the information to a query in their index of sites, not the actual sites. Thus, getting into the index is super important for your SEO optimization.

Google uses software known as web crawlers that look at web-pages and follow links on those pages to bring data about them back to Google’s servers. You can check more details about how Google Search works and organizes information in this guide.

Before you begin, make sure that you toggle off the option Block this website form being indexed by the search engines in the General info tab in the Settings of your site:

Important: only Pro sites can be visible to the search engines.

To check whether a site was indexed and when, enter site:domain.com in the browser search, where domain.com is the your actual domain name:

A list of all the indexed pages will appear in the search results. If there is none, the site hasn’t been indexed yet.

Tip: in case you have a particular page that is not ready yet or there is copy-pasted content which you don’t want to show the robots and customers, check the article Hiding a page from search engines to get more detailed information.

To check the version of the page that the search engines last saw, click on the small triangular and choose Cached from the drop-down:

At the top of the opened window you'll see the date when your website was indexed last time:

Important: sites are usually crawled and indexed within 2-6 weeks after publishing. All SEO changes on the site (meta titles and descriptions, alt-text, etc.) also have to be indexed to be displayed in the search results. To speed up the process, add the site to the Google Search Console — this will notify Google that a new site has been created (or an old one updated) and will request to index it.

Updated on: 04/10/2023

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