If you’re impatient, you may want to get your site indexed fast. Here’s how to do it. And whether it’s worth any extra effort or not!

Every now and then, programs and offers come out that claim to get your site indexed by Google in record time.

Are they worth paying any money for?

Or are they just hot air?

Let’s start with what being indexed by Google actually means:

It simply means that Google’s robot has crawled (visited) your web page and has put it in the list of possible pages to return in the results.

It’s nowhere near that same as actually appearing in the search results.

You can find out the pages that Google has indexed by putting the word “site” (but with no quote marks) followed immediately by a colon and then followed immediately by your domain name.

So for my site, the search would be:

site:trevordumbleton.com

That returns all the different pages that Google has indexed. 399 at the time of writing, likely more by the time you read this.

But it doesn’t say anything about when or where – if anywhere – the pages will show up in the search results, otherwise Google would be sending me hundreds of visitors a day.

As far as I can work out, the indexing process is along these lines:

• Find out a page exists e.g. with the built-in pinging system in WordPress or from a link or wherever
• Send a robot to retrieve the contents of the page providing it’s not prevented by robots.txt or a noindex meta tag
• Do some initial processing in case the contents of the page are date sensitive – that’s why news and PR sites often show up in the results but not for very long
• Maybe put the page in the search results to find out the click rates – that’s when a lot of people get excited because they’ve got to page one of Google in record time and then they get depressed when the page is dropped from page one whilst Google do some more calculations. It’s also why a lot of the pages shown on “Get to page 1 of Google overnight” offers are regularly nowhere to be seen when you look for them
• Do some more processing to work out where the page should really show in the search results and adjust for that over time

Notice that the only thing that needs to happen is the page gets indexed initially.

Getting your site indexed or any new page indexed has no bearing whatsoever on if or when it will get shown in any real results.

So long as your page gets indexed, the speed you’re indexed also has little bearing on how long it takes to show in the results.

If you’ve got a WordPress site that’s updated regularly, Google will get notified when you add new content and depending on other factors will crawl round and index the new page reasonably fast. In my experience, anything from an hour to a few weeks.

Pestering it to index the page faster doesn’t do much, if anything.

So the sales page I just read for a product that shows their site getting indexed in a handful of minutes means nothing other than Google’s crawled it.

It’s got no backlinks found by aHrefs or Majestic. And Majestic even put a message on screen asking if the site existed!

So don’t sweat about getting your site indexed fast.

That will probably happen anyway.

There’s no need to submit it or ping it if you’ve got a WordPress site – WordPress takes care of that.

And there’s definitely no need to pay for software or someone on Fiverr to get it indexed.

Concentrate on building links to your site and more content on your site.

And if you need help creating content for your site, click across to this page.

By the way, this page was published at 13:48 on 21st January 2013. I’ll update the page as to when it gets indexed.

Update: Google crawled it the same day at 14:24, just 36 minutes after it was published.