In the context of SEO, an index refers to a search engine’s database of web pages that it has discovered and has determined to be relevant and of high quality. When a search engine crawls the web, it discovers new web pages and adds them to its index. The search engine’s index is used to generate search results when a user conducts a search.
The process of adding a web page to a search engine’s index is known as indexing. When a search engine indexes a web page, it analyzes the content of the page and assigns it a relevance score based on factors such as the presence of keywords, the quality of the content, and the presence of links from other high-quality websites. The relevance score is used to determine how the page should rank in search results for relevant queries.
It’s important for websites to be indexed by search engines in order to be found by users through search. There are various techniques that can be used to improve the chances of a website being indexed by search engines, such as optimizing the website’s content and structure, and building high-quality backlinks.
What is Index?
An index is the collection of information (contained in a large database) a search engine has that searchers can query against. With crawler-based search engines, the index is typically copies of all the web pages they have found from crawling the web. With human-powered directories, the index contains the summaries of all web sites that have been categorized.
