Learn all about digital marketing, we have built this glossary to help you understand everything to thrive in online marketing and promoting your website or business.
What is Indexability?
Indexability refers to the ability of a page to be crawled and indexed by search engines. It forms the groundwork for how pages are ranked in search results. If a webpage is non-indexable, it cannot be crawled or indexed by search engine robots, and won't appear in search results. This is crucial in digital marketing, because if search engines can't access a webpage, neither can potential clients.
There are several factors that can affect a page's indexability, including its meta tags, robots.txt file, and website architecture. For example, setting a page's meta tag to 'noindex' will instruct search engines not to include the page in their index. Other factors can include the page's content relevance, quality of coding and how frequently it's updated.
Having an indexable website increases its visibility, and leads to higher rankings in search engine results page(SERP). As a result, ensuring your website is indexable is one of the key steps in implementing a successful digital marketing strategy.
Indexability’s Role in Digital Marketing
Indexability plays a significant role in digital marketing as it influences SEO and website visibility. Without proper indexing, your content will go unnoticed by search engines, and fails to reach your target audience.
Improving web indexability is a crucial process in digital marketing. It involves ensuring that your website's pages are easily accessed, crawled, and indexed by search engine bots so that they can be visible on search engine result pages(SERP). This visibility then contributes to increased website traffic, potential leads, and conversions.
Moreover, proper indexing can provide valuable insights into how your website is performing. It can help reveal technical issues such as broken links that could negatively impact your site's ranking and overall user experience.
Indexability Examples
An example where indexability is crucial is an ecommerce website. If an ecommerce store's product pages are not indexed, these products will not appear in search engine result pages, lowering potential sales and impacting business revenue.
Another example of indexability is the use of a robots.txt file. This file is used to instruct search engines which pages to crawl and index. If a webpage is disallowed in the robots.txt file, search engines will skip over it, rendering it non-indexable.
Also, using meta tags in the head section of your HTML, such as the “noindex” tag, you can instruct search engines not to index a webpage. If you want a page to be private or if the page doesn’t have SEO value, using the “noindex” tag is a great indexability control measure.