Even if you develop the most user-friendly website and publish high-quality content, you won’t reach your marketing goals or obtain new clientele if Google is unable to crawl or index your website. To help Google crawl your law firm’s website, you need to have foundational SEO knowledge, as well as specific indexing knowledge. We will take a look at the basics of crawling And indexing, as well as what steps you need to take to ensure Google and crawl your website. 

The Basics of Crawling and Indexing  

Google wants to provide users with the most current and relevant search results and see what uses “spiders” to crawl from site to site. Google’s spiders crawl websites for new information on a continuously updated database.

Google’s spiders follow links to content and store the crawl information in Google’s index. When a user performs a search, Google search through its database to provide answers quickly and efficiently.

Google database stores trillions of pages of information. Its web index is essentially a database of invaluable information.

How To Check Your Indexing Status 

If you are just getting started, it can take time for Google’s spiders to crawl your website and index the pages in the database. If weeks or months pass and you still are not seeing any results, it is time to investigate. 

To check the status of any web page, all you need to do is enter “site:yourdomain.com/.” When you type that into Google, the results will show you all of the pages the search engine has indexed, as well as the current meta tags saved in the index. If none of your pages appear, it means that your site has not been indexed. 

Ten Steps to Help Google Crawl Your Website

If you discover Google is not indexing your web pages, it means that your website is invisible to search queries. To improve your organic traffic and website visibility, there are a series of steps you should take to ensure Google can crawl your website more efficiently. 

1. Delete Crawl Blocks Snippets 

You could have a crawl block issue. Crawl blocks happen in robots.txt files. The code snippet tells Google it is not allowed to crawl any of the pages on your website. Check the backend for either of these code snippets and remove them:

• User-agent: Googlebot, Disallow: /
• User-agent: *, Disallow: /

2. Remove Noindex Tags

Sometimes, web pages are kept private. However, pages that are accidentally marked as not indexed can hurt your website. To determine what pages have a noindex meta tag, you can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit. Under the Indexability report, you can look for noindex page warnings and address them as needed.  

3. Delete Unnecessary Canonical Tags  

If you have unnecessary canonical tags, your web pages may not be indexed. Canonical tags inform Google of preferred web pages’ canonical tags. While most pages have no canonical tag or self-referencing canonical tag, they could be telling Google about page versions that do not exist.  

4. Build a Sitemap  

You need a sitemap on your website. A sitemap is a webpage that tells Google which pages are most important and how often your website should be recrawled. While Google should find all of the pages on your website, whether you include them in the sitemap, it is considered good practice to add them. If you are uncertain whether a specific webpage is included in your sitemap, you can use the URL inspection tool in Search Console. 

5. Add Internal Links 

When Google crawls your website, it is looking for new content. You need to add internal links to your website to ensure that content is found. You can do that from any other web page Google has crawled and indexed. 

6. Look for Orphaned Pages 

Any page that does not have internal links pointing to it is considered an orphaned page. When Google crawls websites, it cannot detect orphaned pages. Website visitors are unable to find them as well. There are two ways you can fix orphaned pages. First, you can delete the page and remove the link from your site map if the page is unimportant. However, if the page is essential, incorporate it into your website by adding it to the internal link structure. 

7. Amend Nofollow Internal Links 

According to Google, pages with nofollow links are not crawled. Nofollow links prevent the transfer of Google’s PageRank to the destination URL. However, it is possible the target page could still appear within the index if other websites are linking to those pages without using nofollow links. To avoid nofollow link issues, ensure all internal links are followed when pointing to indexable pages. 

8. Check for Technical Issues and Poor Content

It is unlikely that Google will index pages it considers low-quality because they offer no value to visitors. If technical issues do not seem to be the reason your page is struggling, look for pages that could be lacking value. If users are unlikely to find value on the page, you need to look for ways to improve your content. 

9. Remove Inadequate or Irrelevant Pages 

The more URLs your website has, the more efficient your crawl budget should be. If you take steps to tackle technical issues and improve your content, but you still have too many low-quality pages, it is time to consider removing some of those pages. Doing so can help optimize your crawl budget. 

10. Improve Your Backlinking Strategy  

Google is more likely to find value in your website if web pages are linked on other websites. Google indexes pages with backlinks and is more likely to view them as necessary. Common backlinking strategies include outreach, guest blogging, and paid promotion. 

Digital Marketing: Next Steps  

To improve your website’s visibility, you need to ensure that Google crawls and indexes your web pages as quickly and efficiently as possible. The following the steps above, you will be on track to increasing the overall traffic to your website and, hopefully, retaining a higher number of potential leads.

Annette Choti graduated from law school 20 years ago, and is now the CEO & Owner of Law Quill, a legal digital marketing agency focused on small and solo law firms. Law Quill is the only legal digital marketing agency that provides unique, SEO-optimized content, pre-packaged content, and courses for lawyers to learn SEO themselves through Law Quill Academy. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or at annette@lawquill.com.