Web Indexing: How Your Search Engine Indexes Your Content

“This took just 0.8 seconds.”

“We are happy to help you.”

You must have noticed these sentences when your favourite search engine answers your queries. Ever wondered how? When you search for something on the web, how do you think it gives you the desired results? It’s fantastic how technology has developed. You post your content on your website, and when someone needs that info, the website shows it to them. The availability of the right content at the right time to someone who needs it is possible due to web indexing. Without web indexing, people would be unaware of so many things.

Web indexing refers to the process where a search engine adds the content of the web to its index. Thanks to web indexing, you know the latest movie gossip, get to know about the latest news, re-read your favourite articles, learn to cook your favourite dishes, window-shop on your phone, and learn about everything that is there on the internet from the comfort of your home. Basically, search engines like Google get to know about your website, run through everything present there, and then associate it with searches, and that’s how you get quick results.

Now that you know what web indexing is, let’s look at how it’s done. Let us try to understand how it is done.

The Process of Web Indexing, Web Crawling, and Spiders

You might wonder how Google selects a certain website and leaves out the rest. The answer is that not everything you or anybody else posts is added to Google’s index. Google follows a certain principle when it comes to indexing content. Here’s the important stuff that you need to have in your content for it to be successfully indexed:

It should have relevant keywords.
It should be easy to navigate.
It should have links—both internal and external.
It should be easily accessible both on mobile and desktop.
Lastly, it shouldn’t be blocked from being indexed.

Once you have created well-researched content, taking care of adding the necessary protocols, you will certainly want search engines to discover your content. For this, search engines like Google use their snoops to find and add your content to their libraries. These snoops are called “spiders” or “web crawlers.” They crawl the web for any new content to be added. It is a given that the internet is a huge space, and even for the spiders, it is not possible to keep track of everything. This is where the above-mentioned practises come in handy. Following those practises helps spiders identify your content and add it to the search engine’s index.

Web crawlers follow these steps to complete their web crawling process:

First, they download your website’s robot.txt file. This file has the list of URLs that need to be crawled.
Once that is done, they go through the URLs to skim through any other links. They add these links to their crawl list.
Once that is done, they add the information present on them to the search engine’s index, and that’s how you can find relevant information on time.
These crawlers also have defined algorithms to tell them when a page should be re-crawled. This takes care of all the updates made to the pages.

The difference between web indexing and web crawling

Many people might get confused between web indexing and web crawling. But, there’s a clear difference. Web crawling is the process of finding data to be added to the search engine’s index. Web indexing stores that information and provides it when a user searches for it. One does the discovery of information; the other takes care of the organisation of that information.

Web indexing makes sure your hard work doesn’t go to waste, provided you follow the necessary steps for your content to be indexed. We, at Valasys Media, help your hard work get recognised. Valasys Media is a globally acclaimed B2B media publisher. We ‘Empower Marketers with Powerful Insights’. Our team of expert professionals can help you with lead management, data solutions, sales pipeline management, and business intelligence solutions.

For more information, feel free to get in touch.

Shruti Sinha

Shruti is a content writer who helps B2B companies with their content needs. Driven by her passion for creating captivating content, she takes pride in being well-versed in writing about business, finance, lifestyle, and technology. She is a firm believer in dreaming big and manifesting them into reality, and her long-term goal is to become a published author.