Sitemaps, Search Console and Getting Indexed

A manufacturer launches a new website on a Monday. Forty product pages, a careful page for each machine, photos from the shop floor. Two weeks later the owner searches for one of his own products and finds nothing. He calls the developer and asks the question every owner asks at some point.

“Is Google broken, or is my site?”

Usually neither. Google simply has not found the pages yet, or found them and decided to wait. This lesson shows you how to tell which, and what you can do about it. None of it needs a developer once it is set up.

01How Does a Page Get Into Google?

Every page goes through the same three steps, and it can stall at any of them.

Indexing is a decision, not a right. Google does not keep every page it reads. Your job is to make discovery easy and give it a good reason to say yes.

02What Is a Sitemap and Do You Need One?

A sitemap is a list of the pages on your site that you want search engines to know about, in a format they read. It does not force anything into the index. It just makes sure nothing important is missed, especially on a new site with few links pointing at it.

If you followed the SEO basics lesson and installed Rank Math, you already have one. Turn on the Sitemap module and it lives at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml, split into smaller sitemaps for pages, posts and any other content types. It updates itself every time you publish.

Open it in a browser and check what is in it. Leave out anything you would not want a customer to land on from Google:

• Thank-you pages shown after a form is sent.
• Tag archives and other thin listing pages you set to noindex.
• Media attachment pages, which are a page for every image you ever uploaded.
• Old or test pages left over from the build.

A sitemap of forty real pages is more useful than one of four hundred, most of them junk.

03How Do You Set Up Google Search Console?

Search Console is Google’s free dashboard for your site. It tells you which pages are indexed, which are not and why, what people searched before they found you, and whether anything is broken. If you only set up one tool from this module, make it this one.

1. Add a property: choose “Domain” if you can edit your domain’s DNS. It covers every version of the site, with and without www. “URL prefix” is easier but covers less.
2. Verify: for a Domain property, add the TXT record Google gives you at your domain registrar. For URL prefix, paste the HTML tag code into Rank Math’s Webmaster Tools settings.
3. Submit the sitemap: under Sitemaps, enter sitemap_index.xml and submit. You do this once.
4. Add people: give your developer access under Settings, Users and permissions, so you never have to share your Google password.

Make sure the property is owned by a Google account the business controls, not by the freelancer who built the site. Lesson 1.3 made the same point about the domain, and the reason is the same.

04Why Bother With Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing’s share of searches in India is small. But Bing’s index also feeds other places people search, such as Microsoft Copilot and DuckDuckGo, and setting it up takes about five minutes. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, choose to import your site from Google Search Console, and it copies the site and the sitemap across. No extra verification needed.

Then switch on IndexNow, which is where Bing becomes genuinely useful.

05What Is IndexNow and Does Google Use It?

IndexNow is a simple way for your site to tell search engines “this page is new or has changed” the moment you publish, instead of waiting for them to come back on their own. Bing and Yandex use it, along with a few smaller search engines that share the signal.

Google does not use IndexNow. As of November 2026 it still relies on its own crawling, your sitemap and links. So IndexNow helps with Bing and friends, and does nothing for Google, whatever a plugin’s settings page implies.

In Rank Math, turn on the Instant Indexing module and choose IndexNow. After that, publishing or updating a page sends the ping automatically. There is nothing else to do.

06How Do You Read the Page Indexing Report?

In Search Console, open Indexing, then Pages. The chart shows how many pages are indexed and how many are not. Below it is a list of reasons for the ones that are not. This list scares people more than it should, because many of the reasons are normal.

Take a fastener manufacturer in Derabassi with a new site of product and industry pages. A month after launch, its report might look like this:

Indexed: 31 — Page with redirect: 12 — Excluded by noindex tag: 18 — Discovered, currently not indexed: 6 — Crawled, currently not indexed: 4

Here is what each of those means, and whether to act:

• Page with redirect: old addresses that now point somewhere else. Normal after a redesign. Leave them.
• Excluded by “noindex” tag: pages you told Google to skip. Fine if they are tag archives or thank-you pages. A problem only if a real service page is in this list.
• Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the page exists but has not got round to crawling it. Common on new sites. Link to these pages from your menu or a related page and give it time.
• Crawled – currently not indexed: Google read the page and chose not to keep it, for now. This is the one to take seriously. It usually means the page looks thin or too similar to another page.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Google found two pages it thinks are the same and picked one. Merge them, or make each clearly different.
• Not found (404): links to pages that do not exist. Fix the link or redirect the address if the page moved.

For the manufacturer, the four crawled-but-not-indexed pages are probably product pages with a photo, a model number and two lines of text. Google sees a dozen such pages on other sites and has no reason to keep another. The fix is content: what the product is for, sizes and materials, who buys it, a drawing or spec sheet, a clear way to ask for a price. Then inspect the page and request indexing again.

07When Should You Request Indexing?

Paste any address into the search bar at the top of Search Console and you get the URL Inspection tool. It tells you whether that page is indexed, when Google last crawled it, and which canonical it chose. If the page is new or you have improved it, click Request Indexing.

Use it for pages that matter: a new service page, a rewritten product page. It is not a button to press every day, and pressing it ten times does not help. If a page is thin, requesting indexing just gets the same answer faster.

After you fix a group of pages with the same problem, open that reason in the report and click Validate Fix. Google rechecks them over the following days or weeks and tells you how it went.

08What Should You Check Every Month?

Ten minutes on the first Monday of the month is enough for a small business site.

• Is the indexed count steady or rising? A sudden drop needs a look the same day.
• Is any page that brings enquiries in the “not indexed” list?
• Has Search Console emailed about security issues or manual actions? Never ignore those.
• In the Performance report, which searches show your pages, and which pages get clicks?

Most months nothing needs doing. The point is to notice the month something does.

If you are launching or rebuilding a site and want the sitemap, Search Console, Bing and IndexNow set up and checked before go-live, that is part of our WordPress development handover.

09What Comes Next?

Your pages are now findable, and you can see what Google thinks of them. The last lesson in this module covers schema and rich results: the hidden labels that tell search engines your address, your services and your reviews, and which of them still change how you appear in results.