10 quick and easy ways to index your website on Google

"How do I get my website on Google?" is the most common question in SEO, and most answers bury the two tactics that matter under a pile of generic advice. Here's the honest version: Google has to discover your URL, decide it's worth crawling, crawl it, then judge it worth keeping in the index. Every method below moves one of those four steps. We've ordered them roughly by effort-to-payoff, so start at the top and stop when your page shows up.

1. Set up Google Search Console first

Nothing else on this list works without it. Search Console is how you prove you own the site, submit sitemaps, see which URLs Google has and hasn't indexed, and request crawls. Verify your domain (DNS verification covers every subdomain and protocol in one shot) and you've unlocked every other tactic here.

2. Submit an XML sitemap

A sitemap is the list of URLs you want Google to know about. Most platforms generate one automatically at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml — WordPress does it via Yoast or Rank Math. Submit it under Search Console then Sitemaps. Remember this is discovery, not a crawl request: it tells Google the URLs exist, not that it needs to crawl them right now.

3. Request indexing with the URL Inspection tool

For a single important URL, paste it into the search bar at the top of Search Console, then click "Request indexing." This drops the URL into a priority crawl queue. It's the official manual button — but it handles one URL at a time and rate-limits hard, so it's a poor fit for more than a handful of pages.

4. Push URLs through Google's Indexing API (the fast lane)

This is the strongest crawl hint Google exposes, and for most pages it's the difference between indexed-today and indexed-someday. The Indexing API says "this URL is new or changed, crawl it now," and it accepts batches instead of one-at-a-time clicks. IndexerNow wraps that API behind a paste-box: sign in with the Google account that owns the Search Console property, paste your URLs, submit. No code, no service-account JSON.

5. Build internal links to every new page

Google discovers and ranks pages partly by following internal links. A page nothing links to is an orphan — hard to find and easy to ignore. Link every new post from your homepage, a category hub, or a related article. Internal links also pass authority, which nudges Google's quality verdict in your favour.

6. Earn a backlink from an already-indexed page

When a page Google already crawls regularly links to your new URL, Googlebot follows that link and finds your page fast. You don't need dozens — a single link from a reasonably trusted, frequently-crawled site can get a stubborn URL indexed within a day. Guest posts, partner mentions, and relevant directories all count.

7. Make sure the page is actually crawlable

• Returns a 200 status — not a 404, a long 301 chain, or a 5xx error.
• No noindex in the robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header (the single most common accidental-deindex cause).
• Not blocked by a Disallow rule in robots.txt.
• Has a self-referencing canonical tag — pointing the canonical elsewhere tells Google to index that other URL instead of this one.

Run the page through an indexability audit before you assume Google is the problem. Most "Google won't index my page" tickets turn out to be a noindex tag or a canonical the owner forgot they set.

8. Publish content that clears Google's quality bar

Google crawls far more pages than it keeps. Thin, near-duplicate, or auto-generated pages get crawled and then quietly dropped under "Crawled, currently not indexed." If a page is a few hundred words of generic filler, fix that before spending crawl requests on it — no amount of pinging makes Google index a page it has already judged not worth indexing.

9. Fix Core Web Vitals and mobile usability

Google crawls fast, mobile-friendly sites more often and more deeply. A slow Time to First Byte eats crawl budget; a broken mobile layout can drag a page below the indexing threshold. Check Largest Contentful Paint, layout shift, and mobile rendering — these are both ranking factors and crawl-rate factors.

10. Ping Bing and the other engines with IndexNow

Google doesn't participate in IndexNow, but Bing, Yandex, and Seznam do — and pinging one pings them all. If you optimise only for Google you're leaving the second-largest search engine on the table. Submit new URLs to IndexNow alongside your Google Indexing API push so every engine hears about the page the same day.

Put it in a repeatable post-publish routine

1. Publish, then confirm the URL returns 200, is indexable, and is in your sitemap.
2. Push the URL through the Indexing API (Google) and IndexNow (Bing and the rest).
3. Add at least one internal link to it from a page Google already crawls.
4. Check the URL Inspection status a few hours later. Still not crawled? Audit the page instead of re-pushing.