Before you will go searching for your website/website pages to know if they’re indexed or not it must be because

(1) You have recently built a website for yourself or business or you contracted this out to a professional web designer/web design agency and in their final report to you, they must have stated that your site is now optimized and submitted to search engine.


(2) Secondly you just thought that once your site is built, it’s automatically indexed by search engines so it’s nice to go check it out.


Whichever be the case, finding out if your website or a particular webpage on your site has been indexed is as simply as going to any of the search engines, eg google and searching using the site: search term which is

site:http://yourdomainname.com/ ( i.e site:http://doerstechnologies.com.ng/ ) if checking for an entire website

OR

site:http://yourdomainname.com/ ( i.e site:http://doerstechnologies.com.ng/ website-design-and-development ) if checking for a single page/post of your site.

Either of the two searches above will produce what is shown in the images below.

You can also do the same with Bing to see what you will find. After this repeat the same search with another website if you get no result, it probably means that the website hasn’t been indexed.

As we can see above, the example website used is properly indexed but that’s just one way of finding out, another way is to go to my Google search console ( formerly Google webmaster tools or Bing Webmaster Tools and check if my site is indexed.

How to check if your Website is Indexed using Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

Before going ahead with the steps, i want to assume, that you have previously submitted your website sitemaps to either of the search engines, if so then follow the steps below to check if your submitted site has been indexed.


1) Sign into your gmail account be it personal or the one linked to your website.

2) Open another tab on your browser and search for and open Google search console.

3) From the listed websites click on the one you want to check it’s indexed status as shown below.

The example website I am using here is wismekplanet.com

4) Next click on crawl on the left side of your search console window and then ‘sitemaps’ if your site is not yet indexed you will see something like the first image below and it will show pending.

But if indexed you will see something like the second image after the first one. The first image was taken just immediately after the sitemaps was submitted to Google through Google Search Console, while the second was taken a moment later.

Now how do you get your website indexed by search engines like Google and Bing?

The first thing you will hear from some quarters when this come up, is to do manual submission, by that we mean submitting your website to the respective search engines.

Although this is right, but is not actually necessary to get your site indexed by search engines like Google as their crawlers, curbs the internet all the time looking for new contents/links/webpages to index and they pick up signals from different sources while doing so.


But then your website stands a better chance of being ranked for it’s targeted keyword, if its first found and indexed by search engines when you


1) Create and optimized your website appropriately, create enough buzz around it and wait quietly for search engine robots to pick up the signal and index your site.


2) Submit your website url through search engine website url submit pages.

The disadvantage with this option though, is that you have to start submitting your webpages url’s one after the other regardless of the number, be it 5 or 100. A better option though, is option ( 3 ) below



3) Create and submit your website XML sitemaps directly to search engines: This is a better option as all you have to do is to create/generate your website XML sitemap which covers all your site pages and in the way the search engine understands it best and then submit same to Google (Through Google search console formerly Google Webmaster tools) and Bing webmaster tools.



How To Submit your Website Sitemap to Google Search Console

The first steps to take before going ahead to submit your various XML Sitemap files to either Google or Bing, is to verify your website. If you haven’t done so, then follow the steps below

We will start off with Google search console (formerly Google Webmaster tools ) and conclude with Bing.

(1) Sing into your Gmail account.

(2) Open another tab on your browser and search for Google search console and click on it.

(3) Once in there, click on “ADD A PROPERTY’ and enter your website url as shown in the image example below and click ‘ADD’ in this example we are using one of our clients website ‘wismekplanet.com’

4) Next you will be asked to verify your website using a recommended method of you download a flock HTML document and uploading same to the root folder of your website or through other alternate options.

You can upload this file using your site FTP credentials or go straight to Cpanel, find File Manager>>> Locate your site root folder and upload the flock HTML document.

(5) After this return back to Google search console verification page, click the link to verify the upload and then verify your website.

Now that you have verified your site, the next thing is to generate your website sitemap and submitting to search engine.

For full details on how to create or generate your XML Sitemaps please follow this link http://doerstechnologies.com.ng/how-to-generate-create-xml-sitemap-website

Let’s Continue with the steps on how to submit your Website XML Sitemap


1)Sign into your gmail account: either personal or the one linked to your business website


2)Open another tab in your browser: and type in Google search console and then click on the link. In the example below I wil submit XML Sitemap for a newly created website wismekplanet.com


3)Once inside Google search console you will see the list of your verified/un-verified websites. Click on the one you want to submit its XML sitemap ( eg wismekplanet.com ) and then click on crawl on the left hand side of the window and then on sitemaps


4) Next click on ‘ADD/TEST SITEMAP’: for you to now add your website sitemaps. Depending on what you used in creating/generating your sitemaps, it’s numbers may vary.

Eg if you built your website with CMS like WordPress, it’s most likely that you will use either of Yoast SEO XML Sitemap or Google XML Sitemap plugin in generating your site XML Sitemap the former will generate number of files for your site XML sitemap, covering posts, pages, categories among others while the later will just create one XML file for your site but still captures all there’s to capture.


For those who coded their website from scratch using sublime text or any other Frontend coding tools, its most likely you generated your website sitemap using one of the online XML Sitemaps generator tools or Screaming frog or you’re comfortable and created the sitemap by yourself.

Whatever be the case, all you need do is just to add your XML Sitemap file as generated/created in the search console sitemap tab.

(5)Once you're done submitting your Website XML Sitemaps, you will see an option to test/refresh the page, do so and the page will now show website XML sitemaps listed accordingly.

Once this is done you will notice it will show as pending at first, check back later and be sure the status changed from pending to indexed as shown in the previous images we used in the example above.

If the pending persists, then be sure to check out some possible errors which could be one of these


(1) Your website having a noindex tag: This tell’s the search engines that this website is not to be indexed.

(2) Index blocked by robots.txt file: Have set of rules and instructions that search engine robots needs to observer.

(3) Or index blocked by .htaccess file

Of which if you're the developer you should be able to sort out and if your site was built by someone else, you should contact same and have them sort things out.

Submitting your XML Sitemap to Bing ( which also covers yahoo ) is not different from what i have covered so far.

You can read the full article with all the steps clearly outlined plus the pictures as well here: http://doerstechnologies.com.ng/how-to-find-out-if-your-website-listed-search-engines

Please if you have any question feel free and ask

This Article was written by Rutherford Ejimonu SEO Specialist for Doers Technologies

CC Lalasticla,mynd44 show some love, this might help a soul out there.

nice, i've submitted my sitemap and fixed its search preference . how long will my blog take to get indexed since its still pending both on google and bing

Please check in both ( Google and Bing Webmaster Tools) if its still pending.

if so you have check the three things I mentioned in the article that could be the possible cause and fixed them.

Remember that having your site indexed is different from its ranking higher on your site targeted keywords.

An important read for those still wondering if their website/blog is indexed or not