How to verify if your site is indexed on Google
It is a seemingly trivial question, but one that actually implies far from minimal relevance to the performance of our online project and on its actual visibility: “Does my site appear in Google’s search results?” And, consequently, what are the ways and techniques to check whether a site’s pages are properly indexed by the search engine? Let’s try to delve into these concepts related to the broader topic of indexing, which, as we know, is a key step for any page that intends to launch its climb up Google’s SERPs.
How to check if your site is listed on Google
How do I know that my site is searchable on Google? To put it in other words, are we sure that we are on Google, that we actually appear in its SERPs and that we can therefore participate in the race towards the mythical first position? With this question opens the fifth installment of Search for Beginners, the series of small videos curated by Google Search Central on YouTube dedicated to those who have (still) few skills in the world of the web, and in particular those who own or manage a small online project. And so, it may happen that such people who “have websites, whether for online activities or as a hobby,” do not know how to check their online presence and “sometimes find the site among Google Search results, but sometimes not.”
The importance of indexing on Google
Ranking, or to brutally put it, placing the pages of our site in the top positions of Google is, in a nutshell, the goal we all strive for and the ultimate goal of SEO. Before ranking, however, there is a decisive step that we must not forget and that we often take for granted, namely indexing, which technically represents the second phase of the mechanism of operation of Google Search, placed, so to speak, somewhere between crawling and ranking.
So it all starts with crawling, which is the process of scanning and downloading text, images and videos from pages found on the Internet by automated programs called crawlers, such as Googlebot, launched to discover new or updated pages to add to Google’s Index. During the next step, which is precisely indexing, Googlebot processes each page it scans to compile this index, which is a huge, constantly expanding database that includes all the words, content, and media files it sees and their location within each page, storing the information and making it quickly usable for subsequent calls.
When a user launches a query on Google, the engine’s automated system performs an index search to find responsive pages and returns the results it deems to be the most relevant and relevant to users. This is what we call ranking or positioning, the final process in which results are sorted hierarchically based on specific criteria, with the goal of returning information relevant to the user’s query
To clarify the importance of indexing, we can say that having a site but not entering the Index is equivalent to