how_does_google_indexing_workWhenever you’re starting a new affiliate website, you need to make sure your website is indexed by the major search engines. If you’ve never gone through the process before, you may be wondering: exactly how does Google index websites? Is there any way to get a new site indexed quickly?

The answer is both yes and no. No, you can’t command Google to index your site overnight, but yes, there are things you can do to help speed the process along. First let’s look at what’s involved in indexing your site, and then we’ll turn to how you can speed up the process.

How Does Google Index Websites?

Google, like all major search engines, has web crawlers (also known as spiders or, simply, Googlebot) that constantly scour the web in search of new material. These crawlers are simply software programs designed to understand the contents of web pages.

While these spiders will recognize all content, it is easier for them to follow and track textual-based content. Basically, a bot will open a web page and read through the html provided for that page. While it’s looking at the page, it is trying to understand a few things:

  1. The content of the page.
  2. The importance of that content.
  3. The pages that page links to.

The crawler accomplished the first two simply by reading the web page and evaluating the markup, including things like page titles, navigation links, and headers. All of these factor into develop a keyword authority for the page.

Additionally, the spider is looking for links. This is the part of the process that pertains to getting a new site indexed. As a spider is reading a page, it will subsequently go through and put all links on the page in a queue, or list of pages to be processed.

How Long Does the Process Take?

On average, Google crawls the entire web every 3-6 months. Since the web is constantly expanding, it can be difficult to assess exactly how long it will take to crawl literally everything.

However, this does not mean that Google visits every web-page once every 3-6 months. Not all web-pages are created equal, and as the bots dig around, many websites come up more frequently than others. This makes sense: Google should find way more links to Facebook or Wikipedia than it will to your site, right?

For your new website, the process for Google to index it depends on how easy it is for Google to become aware of your site, and how easy it is for Google to navigate your site. On average, Google indexes new websites 1-4 weeks after they are created.

Continue reading to learn how you can speed up the process for your site with a few website index tips.