What Are Indexed URLs?
The majority of visitors arrive at a website after typing a search term into popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. When a search engine decides to include a URL in its database, it is included in the results when a user makes a relevant search. An URL included in a search engine database is an indexed URL.
Other People Are Reading
-
Benefits of Being Indexed
-
Commercial websites must have human visitors landing on the site in order to survive. You can acquire visitors, which are commonly know online as "traffic," through many channels. These could be paying for an advert to be displayed on a popular website, advertising in offline publications, or paying for clicks from search engines. However, as visitors that come to your site after finding it among search engine results are free traffic, it is desirable for a webmaster to have his webpages indexed by search engines.
Getting a Page Indexed
-
When you initially publish your website, the pages will not be indexed. In order to speed up the indexing process, there are several methods you can use. These include submitting your URL to the main search engines by using the "add URL" links, submitting a sitemap to the engine via the provided webmaster tools, or submitting your site's URL to many directories that are crawled regularly by search engine spiders. Directory submission can be achieved in a short time by using a dedicated directory submission service or software.
-
Paid Vs. Indexed
-
A 2009 report on the Penn State Live news website, claimed that a study undertook by Penn State and the Queensland University of Technology found that Internet users were more likely to click on indexed pages displayed on the organic search results than sponsored paid advertisements. The study found that only 15 percent of users clicked on sponsored listings.
De-Indexing a URL
-
Although under normal circumstances webmasters are delighted to see their URLs in a search engine's index, this is not always the case. If you have a page that provides member downloads or personal information you might be horrified to find it indexed, and showing in organic search results. You can rectify this by placing a noindex meta tag in the "head" section of the webpages you wish to remove from the index.
-
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
