Telling Google Your Pages Exist

Three routes to discovery

A search engine finds pages in a small number of ways, and it is worth knowing which is doing the work.

Following links, from your own pages or from somebody else's. This is the main route and always has been.

Reading a sitemap, which is a file listing your pages.

Direct submission, where you request a specific page be looked at.

The first is by some distance the most important and the one most neglected, because it is not a task anybody thinks of as a task.

Internal links do most of it

A page linked from your navigation, or from other pages, will be found and revisited.

A page linked from nowhere is an orphan, and it may sit unfound indefinitely regardless of what a sitemap says.

Orphans happen more often than people expect: a page created and never added to the menu, an old page whose links were removed during a redesign, or a landing page built for a campaign and never connected to anything.

Which makes checking for them worth an hour, and fixing them a matter of adding a link somewhere sensible.

Links also carry meaning. A link whose text says bathroom fitting tells a search engine what the destination is about, in a way a sitemap entry does not.

What a sitemap actually is

A file, usually at a predictable address, listing the pages you want found.

Most site platforms generate one automatically and keep it current, which means for many businesses this is already done and nobody knows.

Check by visiting your address followed by the usual sitemap filename and seeing whether something appears.

If it does, submit it once in Search Console and forget about it.

If it does not, most platforms have a setting or a plugin that produces one, and it is a ten-minute job.

What a sitemap does not do

• It does not cause indexing. It aids discovery only.
• It does not improve ranking.
• It does not override an instruction not to index.
• It does not replace internal links.
• It does not help a blocked site.

The fourth is the misunderstanding worth correcting. A sitemap says a page exists; internal links say it matters and what it is about.

A worked example

A business with about thirty pages, of which eleven were never appearing in search.

The sitemap listed all thirty and had been submitted correctly.

The eleven were pages created during a redesign, added to the sitemap automatically, and linked from nothing. The old navigation had pointed at their predecessors.

Adding them to the menu and linking to them from related pages resolved it over the following weeks.

Nothing about the sitemap had been wrong. It had simply never been sufficient on its own, which is the general case.

Submitting individual pages

Useful in narrow circumstances and over-used generally.

Search Console lets you request that a specific page be looked at, which is worth doing for a genuinely new page you want found quickly, or a page you have just fixed.

It is not worth doing routinely for every page, it does not improve ranking, and repeated requests for the same page achieve nothing.

The honest use is: publish something, request indexing once, and leave it.

For a site with a working sitemap and sensible internal links, this is a convenience rather than a requirement.

Links from other sites

The third route, and the one that matters most for a genuinely new site.

A brand new domain with no links from anywhere can take a while to be found at all, because there is no path to it.

The ordinary sources are enough: a business listing, a trade association directory, a supplier's page, a local chamber, a professional register.

Those are legitimate, easy, and take an afternoon to arrange, and they solve the discovery problem for a new site.

What is not worth doing is buying links, which is against guidelines, ineffective and occasionally harmful.

The counter-case

Where you do not want a page found.

Thank you pages, internal documents, staging copies, and anything not meant for the public.

Those should carry an instruction not to index, and should not appear in the sitemap.

A common mistake is relying on a page being unlinked to keep it private, which is not a security measure. An unlinked page can still be found through a browser, a shared link or a log file.

Anything genuinely private needs a password rather than obscurity.

Finding your own orphans

1. List every page from your sitemap or platform.
2. List every page reachable by clicking from the homepage.
3. Compare the two lists.
4. Anything in the first and not the second is an orphan.
5. Link to each from somewhere sensible, or delete it.

The fifth is the decision people avoid making. A page nothing links to, that nobody has read in three years, is frequently better deleted than rescued.

Link text, which is doing more than you think

A detail worth getting right once, since it affects every link on the site.

The words in a link describe the destination, both to a reader and to a search engine.

Which means click here, read more and find out more are wasted, because they describe nothing. A page linked forty times as read more is described forty times as nothing.

The alternative costs no effort: bathroom fitting in Coquitlam, our pricing, how a survey works.

It is also considerably better for anybody using a screen reader, who may navigate by jumping between links and hears only the link text, out of context.

A page of links all reading read more is unusable that way, and the fix improves the page for everybody.

What to do this week

Check whether you have a sitemap, submit it if not already done, and spend an hour looking for orphans.

Then look at your main service pages and make sure each is linked from at least two other places on your own site.

That is the whole of what a small business needs to do about discovery, and it does not need repeating more than once a year.

Beyond that, discovery looks after itself. It is one of the few parts of this subject that is genuinely finished once it is done properly.

What happens after discovery is covered in what Google has to do before it can rank you.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.