If you've recently gone live with a website using a custom domain (eg. mycompany.com), you'll want to ensure that your potential customers can find you on popular search engines, such as Google. To achieve this, you'll want to ensure that Google has 'indexed' the pages on your website.

How your website supports indexing of its pages

Your website comes standard with a robots.txt file as well as a site map page. These can be found at the following locations:

https://mydomain.com/robots.txt

https://mydomain.com/sitemap/

Feel free to visit these URLs to see their content, but remember to replace 'mydomain.com' with your own domain. The robots.txt file tells Google that it is allowed to 'crawl' or index your website so that users of Google will see your site in their search results. The /sitemap/ url gives Google information on the structure of your website as well as information on which pages are important. This further aids Google in the indexing of your website so that potential customers can find your website.

How to speed up the indexing process

Despite the fact that your website comes standard with a robots.txt and /sitemap/ page, it can take Google between 4 days and 4 weeks to crawl and then index your website. Fortunately, there are ways to speed up the 'indexing' process.

Step 1)

Visit https://search.google.com/search-console/, click 'Start Now' and log into your Google account.

Step 2)

You'll be presented with a page that asks you to specify your domain. Enter your domain and click "Continue".

Step 3)

Copy the TXT record provided and send it to our support group (either via a support ticket or direct email). We'll add the record to your DNS settings and let you know when this change has been pushed to the worlds' DNS servers.

Step 4)

Go back to your Google Search Console account. Repeat step 2. This time, rather than copying the txt record, click "Verify".

Step 5)

You will see a popup that indicates that you've verified your ownership of the domain.

Step 6) 

At the top of the page, click on the icon on the left and select your domain from the list.

Step 7)

In the left menu, select 'Sitemaps'

Step 8) 

Enter the path of your sitemap as shown below. Replace mycompany.com with your own domain. Click 'Submit'.

With your sitemap submitted to Google, it will be aware of your desire to have your pages indexed. Google gives no estimate with regards to how long it will take to index your pages, but you should expect your pages to be indexed within a few days.

Checking Google to see which pages it has indexed

To see which pages of yours Google has indexed, go to Google.com and execute the following search where mycompany.com is your own domain.

The results of this search will show which of your pages Google has indexed.

**Please note that if you are moving your website from another platform onto ours, the URLs associated with your previous website will be indexed until Google updates its indexing with your new pages. If you attempt to access these outdated URLs (eg. mycompany.com/my-old-contact-page), you will receive an error as these URLs are no longer valid on your new website.

Indexing your subdomain-based website

If you're using our free plan and are running your website using a subdomain-based address, your website will be indexed by Google, but it may take a few days.