Welcome back to our starter guide for Google Search Console!
If you missed last weeks article, you can find it here.
This week, we’re covering off how to check your indexing status for your page. Let’s get started!
Check Your Page’s the Index Status
Google Search Console is the place to see if Google has picked up your pages for indexing.
Let’s say you created a page specifically to generate traffic for your new inventory. But when you go to search for the page on Google, it’s not showing up!
Start by seeing if Google has picked up the page in its indexing. You can do this by checking the index status of your page.
To check on your index status, copy and paste the URL into the Search Bar at the top.
Once you submit it, it’ll take Search Console a few seconds to pull your information. Once it does, you should see something like this:
This is your page report. It has a few sections on here that are worth pointing out.
The first section tells you whether or not Google has indexed it. This is shown in the first box of the page. If it has been indexed, it’s able to be seen on Google.
As you can see in our example, this page is indexable on Google and is able to be searched and found.
If you open up the Coverage tab, you’ll see several more details, such as when it was last crawled or what page it’s canonicalized to.
Another nifty feature is the ability to request Manual Indexing.
If you recently changed your page and want Google to recrawl it, all you need to do is click Request Indexing.
When Do You Need to Manually Index?
Manual indexing can help if you are testing how your pages look on a search engine’s result page or if there’s a critical error that you need to fix right now. In those cases, it’s recommended that you request a manual crawl.
However, this feature doesn’t catapult you to the top of rankings or give you any competitive advantage other than getting a quick fix to your pages. Luckily, Google crawls your site quite often. It doesn’t need assistance to find your pages day-to-day.
That saves you a boatload of time making sure Google is checking your pages and ranking your site.
That’s all for week! Next week, we’ll dive into how to pull your rankings using Google Search Console as well as how to identify which pages need to be beefed up. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. Or if you need to access support, email us at support@fzautomotive.com.
Until next time!