Why Indexing and De-Indexing Both Should be Used

More than half the marketers are busy getting their website indexed in Google’s search list. Getting de-indexed is like a wound which would not heal. Those who are attempting to improve their authority and influence in the web world, automatically try to index all their web pages. Truth to be told, usually this tactic works.

However, this Google indexing process might work always. As experts claim publishing multiple pages with targeted keywords will be able to help you acquire higher ranking.

Yet, if you explore deeper, you will find that if you keep a few pages out of the indexing list, your website will perform better. Once you de-index some of the web pages, you will be able to drive traffic to the pages that are relevant.

Indexing Decoded

Before going further, it is important to understand indexing.  What does it mean? How does it work? How is this different from crawling?

In layman’s term indexing refers to adding web link to the search engine’s index page. This makes search engine capable of identify your website. Once a page is indexed in Google’s index list, Google gets to crawl and index the certain web pages. However, if you de-index a page, Google will not be able to index it.

Those who are using Wordpress know that Wordpress’s posts and pages are indexed by default. It is good idea to add relevant web pages to Google’s index list. This helps the search engine to get better click and more traffic.

However, even though indexing helps you get better exposure, if you don’t index pages or posts that are not effective for your business, you need to de-index them for better website performance.

Crawl Decoded

Now, let’s take a look at crawl. What does it mean? How is it different from indexing?

In the world of SEO crawling refers to going through a path. Crawlers are used to follow links. These can extract data from different websites. This is called web scraping. Following this path, Google bot finds other links on your website.

So, why getting your website de-indexed will be beneficial for you?

Over optimizing website does not help. If you think that over optimizing a website is not possible, think again.

When you optimize too much, you end up harming your website. Going overboard might affect your ranking. This is why, you must decide to remove some of the pages from the index list.

By doing this, you will be able to prevent indexing duplicate contents. Other than de-indexing duplicate content, you need to de-index the thank you page as well.

Removing Spammy Profile

In case, you want to include community profiles in the index list, you need to make sure that you only include the influential users. You might turn off the search engine visibility of Wordpress. But, this does not work. The community profiles will be still visible in the search result. This is why, must make sure to de-index these profiles to make sure they don’t come up in the search results.

Noindex Pages

Many marketers use meta tags to prevent a web page from showing a search result. For this, you need to copy and paste contents. You need to use the tags that are known as Noindex.

However, before getting to know how Noindex works, let’s have a look at how it is different from Nofollow.

Noindex tag allows the crawlers to work on a page. However, it does not allow search engine to index the particular page. The page will not get into search engine’s index. This means the page will not show up in any kind of search result.

In case of nofollow, the search engine fails to even crawl the links of the web page. However, the page with this tag can be indexed.

Each of these tags can be used separately. These can be used together as well. However, make sure to add noindex only when you are absolutely sure that you don’t want search engine to add the web page to the index list.

Indexing and De-indexing Mistakes

While using de-indexing is important to direct traffic to the more relevant pages, there are certain ways to ruin everything with deindex tactic. You need to know about these so that you can avoid them.

Nofollow Tags

One thing you need to remember that nofollow does not prevent a web page from getting indexed. However, this tag can very well ruin your optimization attempt. This is why you must be really careful about using this tag. The pages you think are absolutely irrelevant to your business objective must include this tag. Otherwise, don’t attempt to add this one for the sake of optimization.

Index Formatting

Marketers, especially the ones who are new in this industry, make the mistake of not following the right format. This creates problem in indexing. Search engine does not get to index contents that are in the images or flash files. Such contents don’t work for your website ranking. This is why you need to be careful when you outing contents in an image.

Though it is not forbidden to include contents or taglines in images, you might be careful about using such contents. Even if you are using such contents, you should make sure to offer some wise alternatives for the visitors and search engine.

Ignoring Canonicalization

Rel=canonical tag is a famous one in the world of SEO. It tells search engine to treat a linked URL as canon.

This tag is used to prevent duplicate content from getting indexed. If duplicate content gets indexed, your ranking might get affected. Duplicate contents can lead to conversion failure. Not using this page is a mistake. If you use it to prevent indexing the duplicate content, you would not have to opt for de-indexing these pages.

Lastly, both indexing and de-indexing play major role in search engine raking. While most of the people are concerned about indexing, they usually don’t pay attention to the need for de-indexing a page. However, you need to remember that sometimes removing irrelevant pages can lead to optimization boost.