Here's what you need to know about website indexes

Key quotes:

• "If you want to keep crawlers from crawling certain URLs, your robots.txt is the best way to do that."
• "Block crawlers from accessing this section using the following directive in your robots.txt: Disallow /admin Important notes Please note that URLs that are disallowed from being crawled by search engines can still appear in search results."
• "The meta robots tags instructs search engines on how to index pages, while keeping the page accessible for visitors."
• "You don’t want these landing pages to be indexed, because that would cause duplicate content issues, so you include the meta robots tag with the noindex directive."
• "Important notes The meta robots tag helps you prevent duplicate content, but it doesn’t attribute topical relevance and authority to another URL."
• "If it’s useful for visitors to be able to access multiple versions of a page and you want search engines to treat them as one version, the canonical URL is the way to go."

Key quotes:

• "Indexing is what ensures that your website gets acknowledged because it’s the only way your pages can be returned in search results."
• "It’s essentially the admin panel for any Google search related matters, allowing you to monitor your site’s traffic, understand how often your site gets crawled by Google, and keep an eye on your site’s indexing."
• "Whether you use Google’s plugin or this website, you’ll be able to regularly create sitemaps and submit them to Google."
• "That helps the search engine to crawl all the pages on your website and generate an accurate index of the content."
• "By using your blog to publish content regularly, you’ll get indexed more often, boost your search engine rankings, and generate 55% more visitors to your site than those who only publish once in a while! By adding internal links that make it easy for people to explore your site, you’ll increase the likelihood that your individual website pages will get crawled and indexed frequently."

Key quotes:

• "If you’re thinking about scraping financial data for personal or business use, here’s what you need to know about what’s accepted, what’s discouraged, and what’s illegal."
• "Search engines like Google or Bing scrape data to index and rank web content, which brings traffic and visibility to the sites it crawls."
• "Those terms are legally binding, so if the business whose data you’re targeting considers you a threat, there’s nothing stopping them from pursuing legal action (sensing a pattern here?)."
• "Web scrapers typically want to pull data as fast as possible, but this can cause major issues for the website being scraped."
• "Scraping is not a reliable long-term solution for your data needs."
• "What are the alternatives to scraping financial data? If you’re wary of the legal and ethical consequences of scraping data (and you most definitely should be, depending on your intended use), there are alternatives."

Key quotes:

• "Now you’re wondering, “Well, how do I do it?” There are many ways to block search engines from indexing pages on your website."
• "We’ll walk through how to de-index pages on HubSpot and WordPress using a few common methods: robots.txt, “noindex” tags, and sitemaps."
• "Disallow: /relative-URL/ Here’s an example of a website with 18 pages that have been blocked from indexing: A “noindex” tag is another method to use when you want to block a search engine from indexing your webpage."
• "The string of code can be found below: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” A sitemap is a list of all pages (or URLs) a user can navigate to on a website."
• "Navigate to the page you would like to block from search engines (Marketing > Website > Landing Pages (or Web Pages) > Edit > Settings > Advanced Options > Additional code snippets > Head HTML."
• "Another way to block a page from search engines is by adding a “noindex” meta tag through the Yoast SEO plugin."

Key quotes:

• "As a business, it makes mobile optimization a priority for you if you’re serious about being a top-ranked result for user search queries."
• "The easiest thing to do is to optimize the desktop version of your site for mobile devices."
• "HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: But for this to really work, you need search engines capable of indexing your mobile web pages efficiently."
• "Even if a user is using a desktop to run their search queries, a site with a better mobile experience will rank higher."
• "HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The impact of Google’s new roll-out depends solely on how your site and its pages are optimized for mobile."
• "The businesses that provide different versions of their web pages for desktop and mobile users are going to be most affected."