What is Google Indexing?

In layman’s terms, indexing is the process of adding web pages into Google search.

Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added to the web search’s index.

By default, every WordPress post and page is indexed.

A good idea for ranking higher in search engines is to let only vital parts of your blog/website be indexed.

Do not index unnecessary archives like tags, categories, and all other useless pages.

What is index?

To put it shortly, index is a huge database Google uses to store the information about every web page it has analyzed. The process of this analysis is called “crawling”, you must have heard this word.

Why is it important to be indexed?

If a website hasn’t been crawled and is not presented in the index, it simply doesn’t exist to the search engine.

This means that the next time someone searches for the information that you have on your site, it won’t be returned to the user in the SERP. Because, once again, to the search engine your website (or some of its pages) simply doesn’t exist.

How to check if my site is indexed by Google?

It’s hard to say the exact amount of time that takes Google to index a website. The general idea is that it’s usually 4 days to 4 weeks, but the exceptions happen and there were a couple of examples when it took less than 4 days for a new site to be indexed.

Checking the overall number of indexed pages on your site is quite easy. Go to Google and type “site:url”, where “url” is your website address. For example, you can check the number of pages Google has indexed on CNN by typing in “site:cnn.com”