How to Manually Request SEO Indexing in Google Search Console

Your content won’t appear in Google search results without proper SEO indexing. And what a shame that would be! You worked so hard to get your content written and published – it deserves to be shown to the world! 

You may have to manually request SEO indexing to get it in search results faster. I know what I just said is super jargony, but I promise it’s easier than you think and worth the effort. And I’m going to walk you through it step by step while sharing why this is so important for your SEO.

(P.S. I learned all this and more in the course SEO On Tap – highly recommend!)

What is Indexing?

Indexing is how search engines like Google organize and store information about websites and the content they publish. When someone performs a search, search engines sort through all the content they’ve indexed to find the most relevant content to show in the results. 

It goes through three steps:

• Crawling: Search engine bots discover and visit web pages to read their content. 
• Indexing: The search engine analyzes the page content and adds and organizes it into its massive database of information.
• Ranking: When someone performs a search, the search engine pulls results from its database and ranks them based on relevance and quality.

I think of SEO indexing as an approval process. Search engines discover your web pages and decide if and when to show them in search results. 

Why is SEO Indexing Important?

For a page to appear in search results, it has to be indexed, which is why this is so important! There’s a misconception that when you publish a new web page, it can be shown in search results. It’s out there in the world, right? That’s not true. It first has to be crawled and indexed by search engines before it can show up in search results. No matter how good your content is, it has to go through this process first.

You can check to see if your website is indexed by searching this in Google:

site:yourdomain.com

This will show every page under that domain that has been indexed. If you don’t see any search results, your website hasn’t been indexed at all. If you see some but not all of your pages, only the ones showing have been indexed. 

Why Do I Need to Request Indexing?

Manually requesting SEO indexing in Google Search Console is an extra bonus step. You don’t really have to do it, but I strongly recommend you do. Search engines go through those three steps with every website: crawl, index, and rank. But we don’t actually know how long that takes. Millions of web pages are published every day. It takes search engines time to crawl, index, and rank each one.

Manually requesting indexing flags search engines and tells them, “Hey, I have a new web page that’s ready for you to index.” You get pushed to the top of the list instead of waiting for them to discover your page. Who knows how long that could take?!

In my experience, pages are typically indexed a few days after I request them. That’s much faster than waiting around. Take a few minutes of initiative to get your web page in search results faster.

How to Manually Request SEO Indexing

Okay, so how do we actually do that?

Create a Google Search Console account. It’s completely free and another resource to see whether or not your pages have been indexed and their status if you’re waiting.

Follow these steps:

• Go to https://search.google.com/search-console
• Sign in with your business Google account.
• Add a domain property (this is the HTTPS version of your website URL.)
• You’ll be given a DNS TXT record to add to your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc.)
• After adding the verification tag or DNS record, click “Verify” in Google Search Console.
• Google will confirm ownership (may take up to 24 hours.)

Once verified, submit your sitemap to Search Console. A sitemap shows search engines all the pages linked to your domain. Put these URLs in a new tab to find your sitemap:

• YourWebsiteUrl.com/sitemap.xml
• YourWebsiteUrl.com/siteinfo.xml
• YourWebsiteUrl.com/sitemap_index.xml
• YourWebsiteUrl.com/sitemap.php

Again, it can take some time for this information to appear in Google Search Console, so be patient!

Okay, is your Search Console account all set up? That was the hard part. Manually requesting SEO indexing is super easy. Follow these steps:

• Paste the URL of a page on your website in the search bar.
• If it says “URL is not on Google,” you can click ‘request indexing.’

And that’s it! You have a limited number of requests a day, so I recommend doing a few a day or a week to stay on top of them.

Why Aren’t My Pages Indexed?

If you go to ‘pages’ on the left sidebar, you can see all your pages that are indexed or not. Google will give you reasons why some pages haven’t been indexed. 

Sometimes, you don’t want pages to be indexed, like your privacy page or a confirmation page. You don’t need those to show up in search results because they don’t offer value. It’s okay when those are skipped.

If any of your main web pages, blogs, or other offers aren’t indexed, you’ll want to look into why Google chose to skip it. You can Google to see what it means, fix whatever is needed, and then request indexing again.

Start Requesting Indexing!

You’re ready to start requesting SEO indexing! It’s a small but important step in making sure your content appears in search results. Why else are you putting in all the effort to research, write, edit, and publish new content?! Take a few minutes to request indexing for your web pages and start seeing new traffic flow in.