How to Get Google Index your Site
How to have Google index your site - Google Index, as cited in Google Help Center, is similar to an index in a library. The Google index lists all of the webpage that Google knows about. In other words, Google index is about introducing your new blog or site to Google so that your blog can be found, crawled, and indexed by Google. Without being indexed by Google, your blog will not be shown in the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
I had Google index my sites including this blog. In order to check whether my blog is indexed by Google, I usually type site:https://writingnblogging.blogspot.com in the Google search box. This is a tips for you if you want to apply Google index checker. You will see a list of search result if your blog has been indexed by Google.
So, how can you have Google index your site? It is very easy. As we have discussed in the other post How to Prepare your Blog in Blogger the Right Way, to have Google index your site or blog you must submit your blog sitemaps to Google. To do so, all you need is to visit and login to Google Search Console. You will need to login with your Gmail account that you used to create your blog; this will help you to go through Google search console verification without pain.
Let's have Google index your site now.
Go to Google Search Console
Make sure that you are logged in with your Gmail account. Again, the Gmail account you use in Google Search Console must be the same with the one you use to create your blog you want to index by Google. Go to Google Search Console page here Google Search Console. You will be redirected to Welcome page where you can add your blog as your property as shown in the picture below:
As you can see, you have two options: Domain and URL prefix. If you are new to Google Search Console, you may be wondering which one of the options suits your need. If you have a website, we recommend you to choose Domain because, as mentioned in the Google Console Help, a domain property aggregates data for all subdomains, protocols, and subpaths of the property. This means that if you have any subdomains in your site, you don't have to add them separately. Meanwhile, if you have a blog like in Blogger, we recommend you to use URL Prefix. See the screenshot below:
We assume that you use Domain Property. Type your domain without prefix. For example, writingnblogging.blogspot.com and not https://writingnblogging.blogspot.com for it will be covered already. After entering your blog address, press continue.
If you use URL Prefix, you must type your URL with https://yourblog.blogspot.com. After that, press continue.
After registering your Domain Property or URL Prefix Property to Google Search Console, you will need to do Google Search Console Verification. This is to verify that you are the owner of the property.
Read also: Discovered - currently not indexed causes and solutions
Google Search Console Verification
There are many verification methods in Google Search Console. If your blog is under Blogger platform, the Google search console verification will be extremely simple. All you need is to be logged in both in your Blogger and Google Search Console with the same Gmail account. As stated by Google, new blogs that you create in Blogger should be added and verified automatically in your Search Console account. If your blog doesn't appear automatically on the Search Console home page, add the property and it should be verified automatically. That sounds nice, isn't it?
However, as it continues, older blogs are not automatically verified, and you should be verified using the HTML tag method, then let's see what you can do to verify your domain property in Google Search Console by using HTML tag method.
You will be given an HTML verification code like this <meta name="google-site-verification" content="......." />. All you need to do is to copy this code to your Blogger HTML page between the <head>...put the code here...</head> and save.
- Go to your Blogger page
- Click Theme
- Click the dropdown beside Customize
- Click Edit HTML
- Paste the Google Search Console HTML tag verification code under the <head> tag or above </head> tag
- Click the save button (floppy disk icon in the upper right corner of the page).
After placing the verification code on your HTML, return to the Google Search Console page and click Verify. This will need less than 15 seconds to complete if your internet connection is good. Now, your domain property is officially registered to Google Search Console. The next thing is to submit your Sitemap so that Google Search Console can send Google Crawler to discover and index your blog.
Pay attention that if you paste the code in the wrong location in your HTML page, Google Search Console will not be able to verify your domain property.
Submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
In your Google Search Console page, you can select your domain property first. Then, you see the Sitemaps menu in the left sidebar (under Index menu). Click Sitemaps and you will be shown Add a new sitemap text box and a submit button.
In Google Search Console, you can submit multiple sitemaps. Pay attention that submitting sitemaps in Google Search Console is by providing the URL to the sitemap and not uploading a sitemap file. Therefore, you need to know your blog sitemap first.
If you are using Blogger platform, all you need to do is to add:
- sitemap.xml
- atom.xml
- rss.xml
- https://writingnblogging.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
- https://writingnblogging.blogspot.com/atom.xml
- https://writingnblogging.blogspot.com/rss.xml
So, yours may be https://yourblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml.
It is also possible to add parameters in your sitemap URLs especially for atom.xml. If you like to add some parameters, just use the following:
- https://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
- https://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
After putting your sitemap URL (submit your sitemap URLs one by one!), click submit button. Google search console will process it in seconds. If no problem occurs, you will see the status success under the Submitted Sitemaps table.
We even tried to put two different types of property for our blogs and here is how it looks like if you have more than one property types and how your submitted sitemaps are showed:
That's the way how you can have Google index your blog. Please remember that this is not a rocket science. It takes time and needs patience. Google will come to index and re-index your site in a certain period of time. Of course, you can ask Google to come to re-index your blog in 3 days or everyday to make sure that your new posts are crawled. You can do this by putting some meta tags in your HTML page will, hopefully, be discussed in the other post.
If you have questions or suggestions relevant to this post, feel free to leave a comment. And if you know someone who needs this information, please share this article link to him or her.
Thank you so much. This post helped me a lot.
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