Indexed Pages

Definition

Indexed pages refer to the web pages that have been discovered by search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and stored in their massive databases. This indexation is critical because only the pages that are indexed are considered during the retrieval and ranking processes when a user conducts a web search. Therefore, when a page is indexed, it is readily available for showing up in search results.

Indexed Pages Relevance For SEO

Indexation is highly relevant for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a simple reason – if a page isn’t indexed, it in effect doesn’t exist in the eyes of search engines, no matter how well it’s optimized. So, making sure your web pages are indexed enhances their likelihood of appearing in the search engine results page (SERP) when users search for terms related to your content.

Indexed Pages Best Practices for SEO

  • Ensure all relevant pages are crawlable: Make sure the vital pages of your website are crawlable by search engine bots. This means configuring your robots.txt file to allow search engines to crawl and index your pages.
  • Update content regularly: Periodically updating your website content can lead to more frequent visits by search engine bots, enhancing the chances of your pages being indexed.
  • Eliminate duplicate content: Search engines can penalize websites with duplicate content by not indexing such pages. To avoid this, use canonical tags to specify the preferred version of the page.
  • Improve page loading speed: Search engines tend to favor pages that load quickly. Slow pages can have lower indexation rates. Therefore, enhancing page load speed can lead to faster and easier indexation.
  • Use internal linking: Internal links help search engine bots navigate your site and discover new pages for indexation. Therefore, ensure you have a good internal linking strategy in place.