Have you ever been left waiting…and waiting…and waiting…for your latest blog post to show up on Google’s search results? If it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only one. It can take anywhere from 4 days to a month for the average blog post to be indexed on their site.
This is because Google must crawl billions of webpages each day, and more authoritative sites tend to see their blog posts indexed before newer ones. Of course, you can’t directly compete with these more well-established sites, but there are some things that you can do to get Google to index your blog posts more quickly. Let’s take a closer look.
Post New Content on a Regular Basis
Publishing new content regularly helps speed up the indexing of your posts in a couple of ways. First, it makes it more likely that your site will see an increase in traffic, as every new post is another chance to appeal to and draw in new visitors. Second, it keeps your sitemap up to date, which allows Google to increase your blog’s crawl rate.
By publishing your new content on a consistent schedule, like every Monday and Friday, for example, Google bots will have an easier time figuring out when to expect your new posts, which often result in them being indexed more quickly.
Use a Good Interlinking Strategy
One of the first things you should do after publishing new blog content is to find some of your older, relevant posts and add internal links to the new one. By adding internal links from your old posts to your new posts, Google will have an easier time discovering your new content.
This is part of following a silo structure on your blog, where you group the blog posts on your site by theme and internally link them to each other. This structure can be rather effective in getting Google to index your blog posts faster.
Submit an RSS Feed of Your Blog
If you create and submit an RSS feed of your blog to a service like FeedBurner by Google, your posts may get indexed a lot faster. The RSS feed can be found in different places depending on the site platform you’re using, but if you’re running a WordPress site, for example, you can find it under (insert your domain name).com/feed.
After you have found your feed, simply enter it into the FeedBurner site. Once your feed is live, you can choose to direct the feed traffic through the service. FeedBurner should now be able to pick up any updates or new content that you publish and will sometimes let Google know about the new posts.
Fetch as Google
While it is normally better to let Google index your posts naturally, if nothing seems to be working then you should consider using the Fetch as Google feature. This feature can index your posts almost instantly, but they may not be ranked right away. Therefore, only use this feature as necessary.
To use this feature, go to Google Search Console, look for the Crawl section, and select Fetch as Google. Enter your post’s URL, hit Fetch and Render, and in the resulting window click Submit to Index.
