How to Index Your Joomla Website with Google

You own a Joomla website, and you’re proud of it, but the thing is, Google still hasn’t indexed it, or Google has indexed only a few pages of your website. So, what do you do to fully index your Joomla website with Google and other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing?

Before starting this post, it is important to note that what we can only recommend the things that you can do that will help your chances in getting indexed with Google, there is no guarantee whatsoever…

So, in order to get indexed, here’s what you should do (we have split this post into two sections: non-technical and technical things that you can do to get your website indexed):

Non-technical things to do to get your website and your pages indexed

Below are the non-technical things that you can do in order to get your website and your pages indexed. Note that the non-technical things have a much better effect to get your website indexed than the technical things.

• Have a good website that you feel proud of: Although Google is not human, it can know if a website is actually good or not. Believe it or not, it is intelligent enough to segregate good from bad websites. If your website is good then it will be accepted by Google and it will show up high in the search results. If it’s bad, then it still may be accepted by Google, but it will show up very low in the search results (low enough that nobody will be able to find it).

• Submit your website to Google: When you’re confident that you have a good website, then the next step to do is to add it to Google. Now while Google is now very good at detecting new websites, it is sometimes essential for a website to be added manually especially if there are absolutely no links to it and it just has a few pages. You can find the link to add your website to Google here. Google will check your website in the next few weeks and will consider it for indexing once the link to your Joomla’s website is added. You should also submit your website with Bing and Yahoo. (Note: We have noticed that usually Google will send you about 70% of the organic traffic, and the rest will be sent by other search engines).

• Ensure that your website contains interesting content: As stated earlier, Google is intelligent. It will know if your content is interesting or not, and it will index your content based on how “interesting” and “original” it is.

• Have a blog: We have noticed that the fastest way to index a Joomla website is to have a blog. You can start a blog by installing one of the many blog extensions that Joomla has. The more blogs you write every week, the faster your website is indexed and the greater the number of your indexed pages is with Google. The location of your blog should be blog.yourdomainname.com or www.yourdomainname.com/blog

• Link to your website from other websites: First let us clarify two things when it comes to this point: We’re not suggesting that you spam other websites at all, and we’re not suggesting questionable techniques to do so. The best thing to link to your website from other websites is to go to blogs in your same line of business, read articles that you can connect with, comment on these articles while ensuring that you link to your blog in the “Website” field. Additionally, if you have an article, a blog post, or a product that you want to share with the readers of your other blog, then feel free to link to it. Many blog owners will immediately approve your comments, and not only that, they will check your website and maybe link to it in another blog post if they think it’s interesting enough. The important thing is to give a genuine, constructive comment.

• Avoid the “link to me and I’ll link to you” technique: This technique is so passée and will most likely get your website penalized (or even totally ignored) by Google if you do this.

• Avoid companies that will “guarantee top spot with Google”: Companies that will tell you that they will guarantee top positions with Google are scammers, this is because there is no way for any company to do this. While some of these companies succeed in increasing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standings and getting your website indexed fast, they will lead, in most cases, to your website getting penalized or even banned (a banned website is completely de-indexed and is added to a black list so that Google will never ever index it again) from Google.

• Promote your website: Commenting on related blogs (see above) is one way to promote your website. But you should also promote your website using Social media (such as Twitter and Facebook), and, in case you want people to know about your website immediately, then you should advertise your website with Google (you’d be surprised how efficient Google advertising can be – if you do it the right way).

• Create internal links: Let’s say you are currently writing an article about “Global Warming”. In your current article, you briefly discuss the “Carbon Tax” and its contribution to reducing global warming, but you remember that you’ve discussed “Carbon Tax” in details in another article. So, you link to your other “Carbon Tax” article from your current article. This will increase the importance of your “Carbon Tax” article in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The more internal links to your articles you have in your website, the more indexed pages you will have with Google.

• Avoid Grammar mistakes and typos: Ensure that all your articles on your Joomla website are written in perfect English. Bad grammar and typos can have extremely negative effects on your website, especially if there are plenty of them and especially if your website is new.

• Ensure that your website is safe for the user: Google will not index/will de-index/will stop indexing a website as soon as the website gets hacked. That’s why you need to make sure that your website is always clean and safe for your visitors. You can check these Joomla security tips if you want to find out more on how you can protect your website.

Technical things to do to get your website and your pages indexed

Following are the technical things that you need to do in order to get both your website and your pages indexed with Google (note that the below are not mandatory, but they can sometimes help):

• Create a sitemap for your visitors: A sitemap is a very old concept in web development. Depending on the type of your website, your visitors may expect a sitemap and may need to use it to find what they want. There are many Joomla extensions that will automatically create a sitemap for you. You can find them here. Search engines, such as Google, used to heavily rely on user sitemaps to index websites (not anymore).

• Avoid getting double-indexed: Double-indexing means that Google will index your website as www.yourdomainname.com and yourdomainname.com . This will dilute the search engine rankings of your website. Double-indexing can be avoided by adding the following lines to your .htaccess files:

  RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]

• Create a Google sitemap and submit it to the Google Webmaster tools: A Google sitemap consists of a file containing links to all the pages on your website. The Google bot will read through your sitemap and will learn about your articles that are not linked from any other page on the Internet. You can create a Google sitemap by installing an extension that will do this (most of the sitemap extensions listed above provide a functionality to create a Google sitemap). You should then submit the sitemap to the Google Webmaster Tools. (Note: You may want to do the same for Yahoo and Bing)

• Avoid indexing pages that shouldn’t be indexed: If you want to know what Google hates most (well besides spam) is indexing pages that shouldn’t be indexed. The file robots.txt that usually exists in the root of your website should be edited to disallow indexing pages/files on your website that should not be indexed. For example, you may want to disallow the indexing of your administrator section on your website, so you open the file robots.txt and you add the following lines:

  User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/

• Don’t use JavaScript to link to another page: You should always use <a href=”… HTML tag to link from one page to another on your website. You should never use JavaScript for linking (most spiders can’t/won’t follow JavaScript links).

• Use canonical URLs: In other words, don’t confuse Google with a page that is listed under more than one link. You can read more about this here.

How to check how many pages are indexed with Google?

Now that you have done your best to have your website indexed with Google, you need to probably see how many pages are actually indexed with this search engine. In order to do so, just go to Google and type: site:www.yourdomainname.com in the search box. If you see something like: Your search – site:www.yourdomainname.com – did not match any documents. then this means that Google hasn’t indexed any of your pages yet. Don’t worry, keep working, and keep checking, and eventually it will, if you’re doing everything the right way, and, of course, if your website is clean!

If you need help doing any of the above, or if you need help in SEO for your Joomla website, then you can just contact us. You’ll be amazed how efficient, fast, helpful, and friendly we are.