Google Search & Indexing articles

Google Search & Indexing 1,187 Being found on Google: Business Profile, Search Console and the basics Having a website is not the same as being found. They are different things, and the second does not happen by itself...
Google Search & Indexing 1,116 Getting your site indexed in Google Search Console, step by step Search Console is the free tool you use to tell Google the site exists, hand it the list of pages, and find out what...
Google Search & Indexing 1,306 robots.txt and sitemap.xml: what they do and how to check them They are two small files that speak to search engines, and it is very common for one of them to be wrong without...
Google Search & Indexing 1,124 Why your site does not show on Google: a checklist “My site does not show on Google” can mean very different things. Google may not know it, may know it and have set...
Google Search & Indexing 1,018 Checking that Google can see your site Opening the site in your own browser does not prove Google can open it. Google’s robot arrives from outside, is not...
Google Search & Indexing 740 How to appear in near me searches when you have a local business When someone types “near me”, or a service plus their area, Google decides using three ideas it publishes itself:...
Google Search & Indexing 1,000 Mobile-first indexing: what Google checks on the phone version of your site For some years now Google has stored and judged mostly the phone version of your pages. It is called mobile-first...
Google Search & Indexing 871 Crawl errors in Search Console: 404, soft 404 and server errors, one by one In Search Console, the Pages (indexing) report lists what Google tried to read and could not, or read and decided...
Google Search & Indexing 1,121 How to remove a page from Google results: noindex, removal tool or password It depends on what you want. For the page to stop existing, delete it and make it return 404 (or 410). For the page...
Google Search & Indexing 991 Will changing hosting hurt your Google ranking? No, as long as the site keeps answering, with the same addresses and the same content. Search engines do not rank a...
Google Search & Indexing 1,118 What happens to your Google ranking when your site goes down? A short, rare outage usually leaves no mark: Google tries again later. What weighs is the long or repeated one: if...