What Is Google Index and How Does It Affect you?

What is Google Index? If you’ve paid for a website for your business, understanding the basic ‘what’ and ‘how’ of Google indexing is an essential.

Search engines play a pivotal role in organising, navigating, and retrieving information amidst the vast sea of webpages. As the world’s leading search engine, Google employs a sophisticated system to catalog and rank the plethora of content available online. Central to this system is the Google Index, a vast database where information from webpages across the internet is stored and managed.

This introductory article aims to explore Google Index, delving into its inner workings, the processes of crawling and indexing, and the critical role it plays in shaping our online search experiences. By understanding Google Index, users, web developers, and digital marketers can better navigate the digital landscape, ensuring that their content is not just visible, but also effectively optimised for Google’s search algorithms.

In short, Google Index is a large database that Google uses to store information on each website that has been ‘scanned’ by Google before it is added to search results.

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What Is Google Index: Understanding Web Crawling

Web crawling means following links as a path through your site. When bots visit your site, other linked pages are examined.

Sitemaps include all of the links on your blog. One reason sitemaps are made is to make it easier for boys to understand the links on your site.

The bots from Google are able to utilize sitemaps to search the site deeply. Google tracks your site when they visit it. This is carried out by Google’s Spider crawler, and the results are placed in the Google index after web crawling is done. Google crawls and indexes web pages according to the meta tag you used.

What Is Google Index: Why Indexing and Web Crawling Are Important

Google indexing and crawling are imperative for the entire web. This is especially true for search engine optimisation purposes. A site simply doesn’t exist in search engines if there hasn’t been any web crawling, and it isn’t in the index. 

So, the next time a potential visitor searches for information on your site, this person wouldn’t get the information returned in the search engine results page (SERP). This is the list of results returned from the search engine when responding to a keyword query.

To the search engine, your site does not exist when it isn’t indexed.

What Is Google Index: How to Check If My Site Is Indexed by Google

“site:” Search Operator

• Step 1: Go to Google.com.
• Step 2: Type “site:yourwebsite.com” into the search bar (replace “yourwebsite.com” with your actual domain name).
• Step 3: Review the search results. Pages from your website that are indexed will be displayed.

Google Search Console

• Step 1: Ensure that you have verified your website on Google Search Console.
• Step 2: Go to the “Indexing” report, where you can see the total number of pages indexed.

XML Sitemap

• Step 1: Submit an XML sitemap of your website via Google Search Console.
• Step 2: Check the “Sitemaps” report in Google Search Console to see how many pages from your sitemap have been indexed.

Third-Party SEO Tools

There are various SEO tools (like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz) that can help you to check indexed pages, but they might not be as accurate or up-to-date as Google’s own tools.

What Is Google Index Status and Why Does It Matter?

The Google Index Status is actually the proper term that many people commonly misconceived as searching the web.
When looking for a book at the library back in the day, you had to search the card catalogue for a book on a certain subject. However, you won’t be able to find a book in the library if there is no such card in the card catalogue.

The Google Index Status works similarly to this library process. Google clicks on links each hour daily to observe where the links go. The process is repeated over again until they presumably reach every site containing links to other sites. 

Information about the site is sent back to Google as the spiders crawl through the web. The information is stored in the index, and the Google algorithm ranks the best results in regards to keywords and search engine rankings.

What Is Google Index: Performing a Google Index Check

There are various ways to check your Google Index status. One way is to type in “Google index checker” on the subject line on Google’s search engine and use one of the search engine results for the Google Index Checker. 

On searchenginereports.net, for instance, you must scroll down to and click on “Google Index checker”. You can obtain the status of five URLs.  Then, you must type/paste in the URL and click on “check”. The index URL and status will return showing the value range from zero to 100 and as indexed or not indexed, respectively.

Other ways to perform Google Index checker include the following:

• Submit URL to Google search engine– by visiting Google’s site for URL submission on your browser, type in your URL. You will go through the verifying process showing that you are human and not a robot. Then once done, you must click “Add URL”.  Their Webmaster Tools can also be used for submitting your URL.
• Submit the site to search engines– just typing in other search engines, such as Ask, Yahoo, and Bing, will show the results.

What Is a Good Google Index Number?

When you check the status of the Google Index, the higher the values, the better the Google Index number is. As traffic builds on your site, Google will begin to rank your site. So, you must continue to monitor and work on increasing your index number which will take time.

You can also check a Google crawler test to determine how your site is fairing on Google. You can type “Google crawler test” on the search engines and choose one of the sites to check how Google sees your site.  Google also offers Webmaster tools on this subject.

What Is Google Index: A Vital Element for a Successful Website

Checking and maintaining a good Google Index is vital for a successful site.

Understanding the basics of Google indexing and crawling means you can apply the right steps to gain more relevance, popularity and income over time.
Good luck!