FreeGoogle Search ConsoleAbout 35 min
Index the Best Few Hundred First
A new directory should not ask Google to index everything on day one. Pick your strongest pages, index those, and keep the rest out until they earn a place.
Why This Matters
A new site with ten thousand thin pages looks like spam to a crawler. Google's spam policies target pages made in bulk with little value, and that can drag down the good pages too. Launching small lets the best pages build a record first.
✓ How To Do It
- Score every listing. Give a point for each of these. A confirmed website, a license link you checked, your own photo, a written summary from a lookup, and a recent checked on date.
- Sort by score. Take the top few hundred. These are your launch set.
- On every other listing, add a robots meta tag that says noindex, follow. The page stays live for visitors, but search engines are told to leave it out.
- Do not block those pages in robots.txt. Google must be able to open a page to see the noindex tag.
- Build your sitemap from the launch set only. Leave noindex pages out of it.
- Verify the site in Search Console, then submit the sitemap. The lessons Verify Your Site in Google Search Console and Submit a Clean XML Sitemap walk through both.
- Wait two to four weeks. Open Pages in Search Console and see how many launch pages are indexed and why others are not. Find Pages Google Won't Index explains the reasons.
- Grow in batches. When most of the set is indexed, look up the next hundred, remove noindex from them, add them to the sitemap, and repeat.
- Do not ping every URL with a bulk submit tool. Let the sitemap do the work.
Done WhenA launch set of a few hundred pages in the sitemap, every other page set to noindex, follow, and the first batch date saved.
Reference List
Tips & Pitfalls
- A noindex page can still be linked and visited. It is only left out of search.
- If many launch pages sit unindexed, fix quality before you add more.
- Write down each batch date and size so you can match them to traffic later.