The first challenge was to programmatically generate dynamic pages in bulk, and the moment you make those pages live, a new challenge appears. The challenge of getting all the generated pages indexed faster in Google.
Yes, just hitting publish is never enough. On a fresh domain, Google might take 2–3 months to index even only a few hundred pages. And sometimes, the pages don’t even get indexed for months.
There is no magic button for faster indexing, but there are certain things that accelerate the indexing process. Let’s take a look…
Ways to get your pSEO site indexed faster
There are no fixed ways to measure or compare the indexing speed, but I have used most of the below-mentioned methods, and they have helped my pSEO sites get indexed faster.
1. Create more internal links and backlinks
First, let’s briefly understand how search engines like Google work by looking at the below diagram:
It all happens in the following 3 steps:
- Search engine bots (or spiders or crawlers) discover a page and check if they have permission to crawl the page
- If bots have permission, they crawl the page and check if the page is good enough to be added to their index
- And if the page is useful for their readers, they index and rank it according to the quality of the page
But when search engine bots crawl a new page, they also discover new webpages by following all the links present on that webpage. That speeds up the discovery of new webpages, and if discovery is accelerated, crawling and indexing get accelerated as well.
- When you add more internal links to and from programmatically generated pages on your website, even if search engine bots land on one of the pages, they can discover (and eventually index) other linked pages faster.
- When you create more backlinks to your website, again, search engine bots discover your website and then all the generated pages more quickly. And that’s the reason programmatic SEO on an existing website provides quicker results.
And not just with faster indexing, improving internal links on your website and having more backlinks has benefits in terms of higher ranking as well (I’m sure you’re already aware of this).
2. Create and submit your sitemap
Well, sitemaps might not be that important if you only have a few pages on your website. In fact, people don’t even have a sitemap for their sites a lot of the time, as you see in the below screenshot.
But in the case of programmatic SEO, when you are creating 100s and even 1000s pages, having a sitemap becomes essential.
If you’re on WordPress, SEO plugins like RankMath and Yoast automatically create sitemaps; but if you have a custom-built site, you will have to set one up properly. It’s not that difficult to automatically add all the generated pages in the sitemap, though.
And once you have the sitemap, submit the sitemap(s) to search engine webmaster tools like
- Google Search Console
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Yandex Webmaster, etc.
Search engines regularly go through the sitemap you provided to discover new content on your website. It saves their computing resources as they don’t have to crawl the entire website for new content, just the sitemap(s).
Since you may be dealing with tens of thousands of programmatically generated pages, you must keep in mind that a single sitemap file can’t contain more than 50,000 URLs and can’t be more than 50 MB in size.
And if your site exceeds these limits, you’re free to have multiple sitemaps.
3. Use Google’s ping tool
Well, I am not very sure whether this method actually works or not. But Google does recommend submitting your sitemap to the ping tool whenever new content is published.
https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=FULL_URL_OF_SITEMAPJust replace the FULL_URL_OF_SITEMAP with the sitemap of your website, and then visit the entire URL in your browser. And that’s it, Google will receive the ping to start crawling new pages on your website.
I also have a tweet showing the same that you can take a look at for more information.
4. Take the help of Google’s indexing API
It’s controversial if Google’s indexing API works for indexing all kinds of new content or not because it clearly mentions that only job-posting and broadcast-event types of content can be indexed. But I have come across several claims that they have been able to get their pages indexed within minutes.
But if you’re worried about whether it’s against Google’s policies to use the indexing API for indexing different types of content, worry not! Google has clarified that using indexing API may not work, but at least it won’t hurt your website.
If you’re on WordPress, you can use RankMath’s plugin to set up and use Google’s indexing API for indexing your programmatically generated posts/pages. In this blog post, RankMath has explained everything in detail.
For sites besides WordPress, you will have to build a custom solution for submitting URLs. You can find sufficient documentation for using the indexing API on this page.
5. Turn on Cloudflare crawler hints
Cloudflare crawler hints don’t help with faster indexing in the Google search, but they can help you accelerate the indexing process in search engines like Bing and Yandex. And if your website receives a significant amount of traffic from these search engines, you should consider using this simple feature.
To turn on the option, just navigate to Cache > Configuration in your Cloudflare account and turn on the toggle button for Crawler Hints.
You can understand more about the working of crawler hints in this blog post by the Cloudflare team.
Please note that to be able to use this option, you should be using Cloudflare on your website. And if you’re not, ignore it, you don’t need to worry about it much.
Final words
There’s one more factor for getting your pages indexed faster in Google and in other search engines: the quality of your programmatic pages. And the quality of programmatic pages depends mainly on the database you prepare and the page template you design.
If you’re new to the topic of programmatic SEO, I will suggest going through this blog post about the topic.
If you have any related queries about faster indexing of programmatic SEO sites, kindly feel free to let me know in the comments below.
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