Do you feel frustrated when you publish one of your best articles and it takes Google ages to discover and index it?
Don’t worry, this happened to me too.
In this article, I will show you how to index a page in Google Search Console and my personal process to get this done. It generally happens in just a few hours after publishing my blog post.
If you don’t have Google Search Console set up yet, go through my article on how to set up Google Search Console first. I explain how to do this step-by-step.
How long does it take Google to index your pages?
Whenever you publish a new article, it can vary, from days to sometimes even weeks for Google to crawl your page and index it. If it gets indexed, to begin with.
Sometimes your pages do get discovered by Google, but they’re not getting indexed. And this can be for multiple reasons.
So whenever I publish a new article on my blog, I want Google to notice it as soon as possible, so I request that Google index my page manually.
The more frequently you publish pages on your site, the more often Google will come back to your site and crawl your pages.
That’s why it also helps when you interlink from older posts to your new ones.
How to manually request indexing your page.
When you log in to your Google Search Console account, on your left menu, you want to head over to URL Inspection.
Here it will ask you to fill in a page from your website.
Copy the link from your newly published blog post and paste it here.
It will show you a message stating: “URL is not on Google” and on the right of that, it gives you the option to Request Indexing.
Now Google will go through that page and see if the page is indexable to begin with and then it will give you a popup message that your request is approved.
How many pages can you manually request to be indexed
Daily, Google will allow you to do 10 indexing requests before it shows you a message that your daily limit is up.
Don’t worry. You can continue the next day.
So depending on how many new pages you have, I would recommend to go through this until all of your pages are indexed.
How fast will your page show up on Google?
Normally when I manually request Google to index my page, it will already be on Google within about 2 hours.
Keep in mind that Google Search Console will have somewhat of a delay and it can take a few days to update your account.
But there’s an easy way to check this beforehand and that is straight on Google itself.
Open your browser and type in:
site:yourdomain
So for my blog, it would be site:https://blogtechsupport.com.
When you hit enter, Google will show you every single page from your website that is indexed and live on Google.
This usually happens already within 1 to 2 hours.
That way, you already know that your page is indexed and it can take a day or two more for it to show up in your Google Search Console data, under the indexed pages section.
Can you request indexing older pages from your site?
If you have pages that are not on Google yet, but are somewhat older, those will oftentimes be discovered but not indexed.
As with new pages, you can also manually request indexing these older pages. The process is exactly the same.
Just click on the page that is discovered but indexed and click on the request indexing option and Google will go through your page again and that page is more likely to be indexed soon.
My publishing routine for new blog posts for indexing
Here are the exact steps I take every time I publish a new article.
- I write my article and before I publish it live, I will make sure all of the images are there, as well as the article being SEO optimised.
- When the article is live on my blog, I go to Google Search Console and type in the link from my new article.
- I manually request Google to index my new article.
- A few hours later, I go to Google and check my indexed pages by typing in the site:mydomain action as shown below.
- Once I notice my article is indexed, I’ll keep an eye on my Search Console account to make sure my page will turn up in the indexed pages area.
- Then I move on and focus my energy on a new article.
If you happen to have lots of non-indexed pages inside your Google Search Console, that doesn’t mean you have to worry about it. I created a Free video training where I explain exactly what to look for and why in some cases, you don’t want your pages to be indexed.
If you happen to have blogging friends who struggle with their pages being indexed and getting traffic from Google, make sure to share this with them.
