Before we talk about these benefits

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We should discuss how Google finds and indexes content. How Google finds and indexes your content Google finds and indexes content in four main steps. SIDENOTE. These are somewhat oversimplified as Google is a complex beast. Step 1. Discover Discovery is where Google learns that your website exists. Google finds most websites and pages from sitemaps or backlinks from known pages. Step 2. Crawl Crawling is where a computer program (spider) called Googlebot visits and downloads your pages. Step 3. Process Processing is where key information is extracted from the crawled pages and prepared for indexing. Step 4. Index Indexing is where processed information from crawled pages is added to a big database called the search index.

This is essentially a digital library of trillions of web pages from which Google pulls search results. Recommended indian phone number reading: How Do Search Engines Work and Why Should You Care? Why submitting to Google is important Each of the four steps above happens in order. It’s a journey. By submitting your website to Google, you can potentially speed up the first part of the process: Discovery. Like any journey, the sooner you set off, the sooner you can arrive at your destination. In this case: indexing. But there are a few other reasons why submitting a sitemap is important. 1. It tells Google which pages are important Sitemaps don’t always include every page on your website. They only list important pages and exclude unimportant or duplicate pages.



This helps to combat issues like the indexing of the wrong version of a page due to duplicate content issues. 2. It tells Google about new pages Many CMS’ add new pages to your sitemap and some ping Google automatically. This saves time having to submit every new page manually. 3. It tells Google about orphan pages Orphan pages are pages without internal links from other pages on your website. Google can’t discover these pages through crawling unless they have backlinks from known pages on other sites. Submitting a sitemap partially solves this problem as orphan pages are usually included in sitemaps—at least those generated by a CMS. How long does it take for Google to index content? Google says that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.