How to Make Sure Google Indexes Your Blog Posts

Is Google indexing all of your blog posts?

Or are many of them being missed?

There are two very simple ways to make sure that Google indexes your blog posts.

Before you these methods, however, you’re going to have to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already.

Adding Your Site to Google Webmaster Tools

To start, you’re going to have to create an account with Google Webmaster Tools.

Just head on over to the site and sign in:

Once you’ve signed in, click the “ADD A SITE” button and enter the URL of your Blog:

Next, you’ll need to verify that you actually own that website.

Google gives you a few different options for verifying your site with instructions on how to complete the verification.

If you purchased your domain at GoDaddy, the process is pretty simple.

If not, you may need to follow the instructions for one of the other methods.

I recommend adding both the www. and the non-www. version of your domain.

For example, if your domain was “example.com”, you would click “ADD A SITE” and put in “www.example.com” and also click “ADD A SITE” again and put in “example.com” (without the www.).

Once you’ve added both versions of the site to Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll want to tell Google which of those two display URLs you prefer.

To do that, click on the little gear icon on the top right of your screen and go to site preferences.

For example, in the picture above you can see that I’m telling Google that I prefer “www.thinkmoneymindset.com” and not just “thinkmoneymindset.com”.

If you’re wondering why this matters, it basically just lets Google know that if anyone links to your website with the “www.” prefix – OR – if they link to your site WITHOUT the “www.” prefix, for Google to see those links as BOTH being links for the same site.

The reason this is important is because if you don’t do this, Google will think that the links pointing to the “www.” prefixed site and the ones pointing to the “non-www.” prefixed site are pointing to two different sites, when it fact its the same website!

By telling Google “Hey, it’s the same website!” you are combining all the link juice you get to both versions of the site into one URL… such as in the example above “www.thinkmoneymindset.com”

Once you’ve got this setup, there are two methods to get your Blog posts indexed by Google.

Method #1 – Submitting a Sitemap

Once you have your sites added to Google, you’ll want to go to your preferred domain and navigate over to the menu item “Crawl > Sitemaps” as shown in the picture above.

Click the “Add/Test Sitemap” and type in the URL of the sitemap for your Blog.

If you’re using Kalatu Brand Station as your Blogging platform, you’ve got a sitemap generator already built in and the URL you would type in there would be “/sitemap.php”.

If you’re using WordPress or some other Blogging platform, you’ll have to install a sitemap generator plugin that will generate a sitemap for you.

Once you’ve submitted a sitemap, Google will go to work to index your pages.

In the picture above you can see that my sitemap submitted 72 URLs to Google and it has already gone ahead and indexed 68 of those.

Most people who don’t do this process are at the mercy of Google’s robots trying to find their pages through external links pointing in, but if you submit a sitemap to Google you are essentially telling them where to go to find your blog posts.

Having a sitemap is an awesome way to automatically get Google to index your pages.

However, just because you submit a sitemap to Google, it doesn’t mean that Google goes and indexes all the pages in the sitemap automatically right away.

Sometimes it can take Google several days, weeks or even months to index some pages.

So what can we do to speed this up?

Well, Google recently launched a new tool that now allows you to manually submit pages for indexing on Google and the tool works INSTANTLY!

Here’s how you find it…

Method #2 – The Fetch as Google Tool

In the menu on the left you’ll find a tool called “Fetch as Google” in the “Crawl” menu.

Click on that, then put in the URL in the input box that pops up, and then click the “FETCH” button.

This will send Google to your site to instantly FETCH the blog post you submitted.

Once Google finds the blog post, it will list it below in the listing of sites available for indexing.

Now there’s just ONE more step…

Beside the status column which should say “Complete” you will see a button called “Submit to Index”.

 

Click that button and you’ll see a pop-up like this:

 

Select the “Crawl only this URL” option and click “GO”.

This will INSTANTLY add your Blog post to the Google Index!

Summary

At first glance this process may seem a bit complicated.

However, the majority of the work that you have to do to set this up only has to be done once.

Adding your sites to Webmaster Tools and selecting your preferred display URL is something you only have to do once.

Same thing with your sitemap.  It’s something you setup once and never really have to touch again.

The only part of this that you’ll be doing on a regular basis is just using the “Fetch as Google” tool to fetch your latest blog posts as you publish them.

Once you get the hang of it, it only takes a few second to do this process and it will help you to make sure that Google has indexed your blog posts.