Website Indexibility and Why Its Important
Simply put, indexability is the potential of a website to be crawled by a search engine. Optimizing indexability is imperative to increase SEO and maximize website performance.
An estimated index count can be performed by adding “site:” to the beginning of any website URL. This indexed count can then be compared to the actual count found in the XML sitemap. If the indexed count and actual count are relatively equal, the search engines are successfully indexing the website’s pages. If the indexed count is smaller than the actual count, the search engine is not indexing all of the available pages. If the indexed count is bigger than the actual count, then the search engine is indexing duplicate content.
Website ranking falls under indexability as well. To check your website ranking in a search engine, simply enter the website URL into the search bar. If it appears amongst the top results then the ranking is good, however if it is not within the top ten the website could potentially be penalized.
Website penalization is mainly caused by Google’s constant algorithmic updates (which sound confusing I know). Basically, Google is constantly trying to improve how websites are created and experienced. Because their are frequent changes, many websites often times “break the rules” set by the new algorithm and are therefore penalized. Website penalization can be detrimental.
In order to determine if a website is penalized, check to see if your pages are not indexed but accessible. If this is the case, the website has been penalized and is not performing optimally in the search engine. This problem can be fixed by more advanced SEO tactics.
Indexability is a crucial component of a website audit. Although it may seem confusing, it can help to determine whether or not your website is functioning at an optimal level.
