How to Get Google To Re-Index Your Website After A Redesign?

When someone heads over to Google to get answers and information, most business owners want their site to be the solution that appears. If you’ve ever wondered how Google gets its answers, website indexing is the process Google uses to get them. For a website redesign or relaunch, it’s important that Google re-indexes the site so it can be included in potential results.

What is Google Indexing?

The Google index is basically all the websites Google has “crawled” (more on that in a minute), making them discoverable by users. Google creates a catalog of all of the websites, and when a user conducts a search on Google, it will produce the sites that it determines to be the most useful or beneficial to its visitors—essentially providing the website to the user that provides the best answer. A site must be indexed to appear in search results. With that said, indexed sites are not guaranteed to appear on the first page—and that is a whole other topic for another post: SEO.

How Does Google Indexing Work?

Google basically uses a three-step process to “index” a website, which includes it in its search results. The site gets crawled, indexed, and finally ranked. Indexing a site means that Google bots found it, and they have added it to their library of resources available when someone types a question or requests information from Google. A website cannot be found by a user using Google if it hasn’t been crawled and indexed.

In order for a website to be indexed, the website must first be crawled. For those unfamiliar with web crawling, this process is completed by bots programmed to analyze and examine all website elements. They scan all parts of the site, each page, images, text, etc. However, it may take awhile for Google to get around to crawling a site, and until then, the site won’t be indexed and won’t show up in results. There are ways to expedite that process (more on that in a bit).

Once a site has been crawled, it usually will be indexed. However, it is important to know that not every page on a site gets indexed. If a Google bot scans a site and finds duplicate content, pages that contain broken links, or 404 errors, or Google simply finds it unhelpful, it won’t index it. Sometimes, a page might be tagged not to index, although that would be intentional.

Once indexed, Google will determine how useful the site could be based on seemingly-ever-changing algorithms. From there, users can find your site. There are ways to make your site more attractive to users and Google, which typically includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but that is an entirely different subject.

Does Your Site Stay the Same With a Website Redesign?

You might think that you just changed the design; the site has the same domain. While it might have the same domain and even some of the same written content, the structure is different and will still need to be re-crawled. Even layout changes can impact indexing. When you have a website redesign, it is important to have Google re-crawl the website so it can be re-indexed and the newest versions of your site show up.

Why You Should Care About Indexing with a Website Redesign?

If Google doesn’t index the site, it won’t appear. No one builds a website for it never to be viewed by a user, and companies don’t invest in a website redesign to have the shiny new site be ignored. The purpose of a re-index is to make sure the new site you’ve worked hard to build will actually be seen. Without re-indexing, Google might even show the old version of the website, which would mean all of the time and money spent on a website redesign would be for nothing. Google re-indexing is necessary with a website redesign so that it displays the most accurate results pertaining to your site.

If you’re using a web development agency, they should prepare your website design with a plan to get it re-indexed. However, for those DIY designers, there are ways to accomplish Google re-indexing solo, but it often takes longer and often doesn’t catch every page. You can also wait and do things to encourage crawling, like adding backlinks when possible, but there’s no guarantee when Google will crawl and re-index the new site. 

Tips to Make Sure Your Site is Ready

Before asking Google to recrawl your site, or realistically, before going live, you’ll want to ensure your site is ready. Check out all of your content to make sure it is relevant, useful, and conveys the information you want it to provide. Conduct a thorough technical examination by reviewing the site structure, fixing broken links, and setting up redirects, making sure that all of the new internal links follow the new structure. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to ask Google to crawl your site (or go live and let it happen when it happens).

Ask Google to Re-Index Your Site

If you’re not content with letting Google get around to crawling your site when it’s ready, you can let Google know you’d like them to crawl it, which can help speed up the process of re-indexing after a website redesign. By logging into your Google console, you can make a few requests that will help speed up crawling and indexing. 

First, you can submit your sitemap and request a Google to crawl it. For a quicker option, you can also ask Google to crawl individual pages, which is great for a small website that doesn’t have many pages because it requires manually submitting requests for each page. If your website has a lot of pages (for example, years of blog posts and relevant content), this option wouldn’t make sense. You can also ask Google to check for errors, which is helpful in two ways: (1) hopefully, no errors are discovered, but if there are, you can fix them, and (2) it forces Google to crawl your page. 

Get Help Re-indexing Your New Website Redesign

If you recently had a website redesign, you may not have realized how the new design can affect indexing and SEO ranking. Are there too many pages in your website redesign to tackle re-indexing manually? Let CloudMellow take care of it for you. Contact us today to get help with your website redesigning and reindexing.