It’s now 2025, and AI development is booming. People are gradually adapting to the way of asking questions to AI to replace traditional search engines. In the process of asking and answering, they get satisfactory answers, which is both convenient and fast, greatly saving our time.
Although AI crawlers from Google or OpenAI often visit our websites, they are only here to scrape content. After AI organizes the content, it does not attribute the data source, so we gain no benefit from it. For a webmaster, after building a website, being crawled and indexed by search engines is still the best way for us to obtain organic traffic.
However, recently, I’ve found that this best way is also slowly becoming not so good. Newly written articles are not indexed by Google in a timely manner, which can result in articles similar to news pieces missing their best timing. Their timeliness is diminished. Sometimes a trending topic is published, but because Google does not index it promptly, the traffic is very poor.
I was at a loss for how to solve this problem, so I opened ChatGPT and started asking questions. It gave me some methods, but the answers were very vague, without specific instructions on how to operate. A few gave some operational steps, but after trying, I found they didn’t work. Below are the answers ChatGPT provided:
Although not all answers are correct, it still gave us some direction. I tried the methods it provided one by one:
Submit to Google Search Console (GSC)
GSC is a tool provided by Google for webmasters. You can link your website in it, view all indexed links, and links that cannot be indexed. If there are any links that cannot be indexed, you can check where the specific problems are and solve them accordingly. This is more beneficial for the long-term development of our website.
Click the top left corner “Add property,” and a selection popup will appear, with two options: Domain and URL prefix:
Domain:
This refers to all URLs under the domain being associated. For example, if you enter the domain as apksilo.com, then all subdomains starting with https://, http:// will be associated. This method requires DNS verification.
URL prefix:
This adds a layer of restriction, specifying a URL prefix. For example, if you set https://apksilo.com, then http://apksilo.com and other subdomains will not be associated.
Create and Submit a Sitemap
What is a sitemap? A sitemap is like giving directions to the crawler, telling it what links are on your website. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:
A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site within a domain.
There are three primary kinds of sitemap:
- Sitemaps used during the planning of a website by its designers
- Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site
- Structured listings intended for web crawlers such as search engines
So how can you create a sitemap?
If you can write code, you can follow the sitemap protocol (https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html), build an XML file, and then deploy and submit it to Google.
If you can’t write code, then you can refer to the service framework you’re currently using, install a specified sitemap generation plugin, and the plugin will automatically generate a sitemap for you. Taking WordPress as an example, I installed Yoast SEO, and this plugin automatically generates a sitemap for me.
How to submit a sitemap? Very simple—click the sidebar’s Sitemaps, then enter the sitemap link and click submit.
Use Internal Linking Strategically
Internal linking refers to the internal links of your website. Crawlers usually start from the homepage when crawling websites, then check what links are on the homepage and crawl layer by layer. At this time, internal linking becomes especially important. If a page is not linked to by any page, that link is called a dead link. Without a sitemap, crawlers will never know that page exists.
Use External Linking Strategically
External linking refers to links from other websites to your website. For some more well-known websites, crawlers usually trust them more and crawl them more frequently. For example, Twitter, Reddit, etc. If you post content there with your website link, the crawler might pick it up immediately and come over.
Speed Up Your Site
This point is often overlooked. Google’s crawler has a budget for each website. The higher the content quality and the faster the response, the more budget it has. So optimizing the site’s response speed is also a good way to accelerate Google indexing.
