How I Increased My Index Speeds And Improved My Search Rankings!

That's right folks! I have made some changes on my blog and Google search console (formley known as Google webmaster tools) which has helped increase my posts getting indexed faster and therefore improving on the search rankings!

Following the below I was able to have two of my posts indexed within a few hours.

Here is how I did it.

Create And Submit A Sitemap To Google Search Console

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is basically a digtal navigation of your website. This helps with the Google bot crawler as it will know exactly what you have on your site and therefore, it will crawl properly.

If the Google bot doesn't know about your posts then it can't index them and therefore, It can't rank them.

This is what a sitemap looks like:

As you can see, this helps Google bot as it lists your entire site navigation.

You need to now check and see if you have a sitemap setup. To check this, simply type in your domain name then followed by /sitemap.xml

YOURDOMAINNAME/sitemap.xml

If nothing appears then it has not been configured. Follow the steps below to enable this.

Enable Sitemap In Your All In One SEO Plugin Settings

First, you will need to enable sitemap on your All in One SEO plugin. Click into feature manager and select enable on sitemap.

Then go into your wordpress dashboard and into the settings of your SEO Plugin (which in this case should be the all in one SEO plugin)

Select XML sitemap as shown below and then ensure the following settings is set:

1. Scheduled Updates is set to daily
2. Post Types = All post types

Then click the update sitemap button to save your settings.

You should now be able to check and see a similar result to the above image by typing your domain name and /sitemap.xml into the URL.

Your sitemap is now created which is great for new posts, but what about old posts that still haven't been indexed? Don't worry, you can force Google to index a specific post which I will show you below.

Force Google Bot To Index Your Posts By Using Fetch As Google

You will need to have Google Search console setup for this work (if you unsure how you can find out in the training)

For your old posts that haven't been indexed, you can use a feature named 'Fetch as Google' to force a bot to crawl (and hopefully index) your posts. However, this can only be done for one post a time (though you can submit multiple posts but you might want to be careful with this)

Google has a quota of 10 fetches a day.

To do this, go into your search console and expand the crawl section. Then select Fetch as Google:

Now in the middle section, put in your post URL and select fetch and render:

That will take several minutes and once done, you will get an option to select a button named "submit re-index" or something similar.

Press that button and wait for Wealthy Affiliate to tell you that Google has indexed your post! :)

I hope this was helpful to you as it was to me. Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them.