To improve your ranking on Google, it pays to understand how Google works. Google sends out its little bots all over the web to crawl pages and get an understanding of what a site is about. It is in this way that you can end up letting Google know about your site content and hopefully, it finds it useful enough to rank it above the competition.
Once the site is crawled, the pages are indexed. This means that they can be shown in search results. Crawled but not indexed pages end up known to Google, but won’t show up in a search result.
It sounds as if this is totally passive and Google is in total control of the process. The fact is that this is not true. You can actually help Google and yourself by taking on more of the process. There are a few things that can be done on your part to make sure that Google really knows what your site is about.
In this article, I will go over five ways that you can take control and help Google help your site.
Robots.txt
There is a section in your code that is essentially a list of instructions. It’s called robots.txt and it tells the bots what to do when they get to your site. The thing is, you don’t want every page, post or category on your site crawled so it doesn’t compete with some keywords on pages that are more important.
With this implemented on your site, only the right pages will get crawled. The bots will pass over certain URLs on your site per the instructions on your robots.txt guide. There is an issue with duplicate content on various pages that can confuse Google and lead to the wrong page getting ranked above the one that you wanted. Robots.txt will help you prevent that from happening.
Another example would be an admin page that is not meant to be seen by the public. Google may crawl and index that page without instructions to not do so.
You’ll end up with a site that preserves its authority and allows Google to rank it accordingly. Another matter is the crawl budget that Google has. It costs money to crawl every page on the internet looking for new content. If you can limit how much Google has to use out of this budget then that keeps them happy.
Robots directives
Even among pages that you do want to be crawled there needs to be a certain set of instructions so Google understands how this content should be treated. This is done by using the canonical URL option or the noncanonical. But, this is not always enough for Google.
Using the robots directives is a more effective way to have this happen. In this way, the pages are accessible for the visitors but at the same time, they aren’t indexed.
An example would be when you have some landing pages that you have visitors arriving onto when you are running ads. Each landing page is going to be different depending on the ad campaign but the content is going to be largely the same on the pages with slight variations. This could cause a duplicate content problem if you aren’t careful. With the robots directive then you can be sure that you won’t have that issue.
You’ll also be able to use it to prevent the authority from being passed onto other pages that you don’t want to rank. This is typically done by using a nofollow qualifier, but it doesn’t really work on its own.
Canonical URLs
A canonical URL is the page that is the authority for a certain keyword. To let Google know that it is the page that it should pay attention to, it needs to have the right attribute. This is the canonical URL attribute.
You can even have multiple pages get the same treatment if they are all relevant to each other so Google understands what you wish the visitor to focus on. These pages can reference each other so the target URL is the one that gets the focus.
An example would be when you have a product on an eCommerce store that is featured in different categories. The target URL should be on the category that serves as the primary one for Google’s purposes. And then the others can be served by the canonical attribution so Google understands the difference.
Hreflang attribute
Targeting the right geographical area is essential for many websites. If you have a product that only ships to a certain area then having it rank for a keyword in another area is useless. Or, if you want to make sure that you get the highest ad revenue for your blog, it helps to target visitors from high RPM areas.
To do this you need to use the hreflang attribute. This will indicate to Google what language is being used so the visitor will feel more comfortable when a result comes back in their language.
It can even help prevent duplicate content issues when you are using translated text from another page of your site.
Pagination attributes
Making sure that Google understands the relevance of your site and will pass authority onto different posts, you should have a pagination attribute when you have an archive. This is when you have different topics of your site grouped together so Google understands the importance of it.
As the link will take a user to the next page of the archive, Google will also follow it and pass some of the authority onto the next page. After all of these pages are crawled it can paint a better picture of what your site is doing and will rank accordingly.
Conclusion
Now you can understand that you do have some control over Google and are not always at their mercy. Your rankings will also improve once you take matters into your own hands.
