Ask Spork Marketing: How Fast Does Google Index A Website?

An auto parts ecommerce client recently asked us this question:

When I make a website live, we add the site and site map to the Google Search Console, but I’m finding that not all of the pages are getting indexed as quickly as I thought they would. Do you have any insight into how and when Google does this?

Answer: There’s no iron clad rule here, but the concept is that Google assigns a crawl “weight” to every website. This weight determines both how quickly sites are indexed and how deeply they’re indexed.

• Low crawl weight sites are new and/or don’t have much Google search “equity.” These sites will be relatively poorly indexed.
• High crawl weight websites are established and/or have a good deal of search equity.

There are other factors to consider as well (the site’s uniqueness relative to the rest of the internet, how fast the site loads, etc.), but basically indexation and crawl frequency are a function of the website’s link profile, age, and overall trustworthiness

How To Get Google To Index More Pages More Quickly

While there’s no guaranteed way to increase your site’s indexation, there are a few things you can try that are all beneficial for one reason or another.

1. Submit a sitemap. Register your site with the Google Search Console and submit an XML sitemap.
2. Fetch a page. If you want Google to index a specific page (like, a category that you just added to the site), you can login to the Search Console and select “Fetch as Google” under the “Crawl” menu, and then add your page and hit the red “Fetch” button. Once the page fetch is done, you can request Google crawl the page (and up to 500 pages under it). This will help get it indexed quickly.
3. Adjust your site structure. Google typically indexes pages that are 2-3 clicks “deep” from the homepage. So, if you’ve got a product or category you want Google to index, you want to link to it from a top-level page (like the homepage or main category page). One easy way to do this is to link to the product or category from the main menu.
4. Add unique content to pages that you want indexed. A lot of companies selling auto parts and accessories online are using default product images and descriptions across the site. Replacing these with custom images and descriptions is a great way to get more search traffic (see our blog post about writing unique descriptions for 1000’s of products for some helpful tips and advice).
5. Improve site speed by reducing page size. If you can find a way to reduce the size of every page by 100kb (or more), Google’s crawlers will probably index more pages on your site. This is because Google’s crawlers have a “budget” that’s measured in both bytes and time. By reducing page size, you can stretch the crawl budget a bit further.
6. Build up your search equity. Last but not least, the most effective strategy of all is to create great content that earns links. If you have a website with lots of great inbound links, lots of social media activity, and great engagement, your site will be indexed deeper and more often. Check out our executive’s guide to SEO to learn more about content and links.

Do you have a question for Spork Marketing? Contact us and we’ll do our best to respond here on the blog.