Indexing: how to index a site

Indexing is the phase in which the search engine collects, analyzes, and stores data to facilitate the rapid and accurate search for information …of a website is the phase in which the search engine collects, analyzes, and stores data to facilitate the rapid and accurate search for information by internet users. The design of the search engine index incorporates interdisciplinary concepts, from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, and computer science.

Alternative names for the indexing process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the internet are web indexing or search engine indexing.

Indexing is therefore the first and most important operation that search engines perform to be able to transmit results on their search result pages on SERP.

If a site is not indexed, it cannot appear in search results. The indexing of websites is carried out automatically by the engine itself, through special programs called spiders (“spiders”), which enter a site and read its source code.

Popular engines (such as Google) focus only on “full-text indexing”, ie they read the textual content of web pages. Before the advent of this technology, which began to consolidate in the mid-90s, indexing was based solely on keywords inserted in meta tags (such as title and meta description tags ), data inserted in the HTML code born specifically to provide information on pages to search engines.

Today these metadata, thanks to “full-text indexing”, have lost importance in favor of the contents on the page, which constitute the true value of a site for search engines, as well as for human beings.

The Topic Of This Post

1 How to get indexed on Google
2 Difference between indexing and search engine ranking
3 Learn more about SEO

How to be indexed on Google

Major search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo !, use crawlers (or spiders), which are automated software, to find pages to the index for their search results, so no manual action is required to index a site. , it is sufficient to wait for a site to obtain at least one link from another site already indexed, and for the search engine crawler to pass on this site, then “notice” its existence.

The web pages connected with a link from other pages already indexed by the search engine, therefore, do not need to be reported to the search engine, because it will find them automatically.

Difference between indexing and search engine ranking

As I explained a few lines above if a site is not indexed, it does not appear in the search results, so there is no optimization or positioning (Search Engine Optimization web pages in the organic results of the engines …) without indexing.

As I explained in the previous paragraph, search engines use crawler automatic to find pages to index. However, these programs guarantee inclusion in the database. Put simply, it can be said, a database in …of the search engine (indexing), but do not guarantee the specific classification in the search results (i.e. the good positioning of the site on the search engine).

For this reason, indexing is only the first step in the ranking process. Then, to get good positions in the rankings of the engines, it is necessary to carry out optimization activities for search engines (Search Engine Optimization or SEO).

A search engine crawler considers several different factors to rank a site, and each web page is indexed by search engines differently, depending on its algorithm.