How To Get Your Site Indexed Before Launch & Why It Matters

• Read original article here

Are you planning to launch a new website? If so, your first step to acquiring traffic will be to get your website indexed on search engines like Google. This will allow your target audience to find you for relevant search queries sooner than later.

This article will look at the many reasons for getting your website indexed as quickly as possible and some ways to do it.

There are many good reasons to get your site indexed in search engines or specific pages before the official launch.

According to Google Advanced SEO documentation, crawling can take anywhere from four days to four weeks.

In a #AskGooglebot session with John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, he answers how long SEO takes for new pages.

Mueller begins with two disclaimers: Google doesn’t guarantee that all webpages will get indexed and that not everything that is indexed is shown to search users.

He continues to say that when a new page is published on the internet, it can take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to get indexed. He “suspects” that most suitable content is indexed within a week.

So, how do we get search engines to begin indexing our sites?

Google Search Console offers multiple ways for website owners to notify Google of a new website and ensure that the most important pages are crawled and indexed. You can start by submitting a sitemap and creating a robots.txt file.

You can also ask Google to crawl your URLs with the URL Inspection tool. They note that indexing can take up to a week or two.

Editor’s note: Like Google, Bing offers a set of tools that website owners can use to get their website on Bing’s radar. This includes their IndexNow protocol. It allows website owners to inform search engines of new website content instantly.

“…it can take days to weeks for search engines to discover that the content has changed, as search engines don’t crawl every URL often. With IndexNow, search engines know immediately the ‘URLs that have changed, helping them prioritize crawl for these URLs and thereby limiting organic crawling to discover new content.'”

Google crawls Twitter at lightning pace. Twitter’s Help Center notes that:

“Keep in mind that the words you write in your Twitter profile or public Tweets may be indexed by Google and other search engines, and cause your profile or Tweets to come up in a search for those terms.”

In 2015, Google began indexing tweets to show in search results.

If you have a Twitter account and you see tweets showing up when you Google your name, try tweeting the link out and see if Google crawls your tweets to your website.

One underutilized technique to get indexed is having backlinks from pages that get crawled by “discover” and “refresh.”

Once you have a blogger or website owner that will give you a backlink or two, see if they’ll log into Search Console.

In the settings area, you’ll be able to download a list of URLs Google crawls and when they crawl.

Find the pages that get crawled the most frequently and ask for the link from these pages. You can find instructions on accessing the crawl stats feature here.

You’ll also want to check a few things before the search engines arrive at your website to help ensure they index your most important pages.

It can be scary to request indexing and have your launch leaked, but would you rather journalists and customers find your competitors versus you and risk losing out on money and backlinks?

If you don’t index your website before launch, it could be a few weeks before consumers find you in search engines. Anyone who shows up for your brand or name may get your customers.