The eCommerce industry is prospering with each passing day at an incredible pace. The immense potential of the eCommerce industry has raised market competition and paid social media advertising costs. The increasing advertising cost has compelled eCommerce SEO experts to redesign their SEO strategies to align with evolving Google ranking matrix for consistent organic traffic. But we have seen people struggling to get their eCommerce sites’ product pages indexed by Google.
How does Google index the product pages? This blog will discuss the Google metrics to index the products, as you can’t get organic traffic and enjoy sales without getting product pages indexed.
How does Google index product pages or products?
Google mainly relies on the following two methods for indexing eCommerce products or product pages,
- Googlebot
- Sitemaps
Googlebot
Googlebots are robotic software that crawls eCommerce sites’ pages to index products. You may know this robotic software as web spiders or crawlers. Googlebot crawls a product page to index all featured information, including the internal or external links on that page. Google uses hundreds of thousands of automated computers to keep crawling the websites on the internet. Google owns Googlebot, as its name implies; all the search engines have specially designed web crawlers with slightly varying working modules to index the product pages.
Googlebot working module
How does Googlebot work to index eCommerce products? You may be surprised that these web spiders are not controlled by any technical team sitting in Google’s office. How do they decide to crawl an eCommerce site when there is no technical team to trigger their crawling activity for a particular website or page?
Googlebots are semi-automated robots; they don’t need instructions to crawl a web page. And it’s not possible to manually trigger these spiders for millions of web pages when internet space witnesses the addition of nearly 252,000 websites worldwide daily.
Googlebots rely on links and sitemaps to crawl a particular webpage for indexing. Link building is crucial to get new product pages crawled by Google, whether they are internal or external links.
Google web spiders note down the new links on a webpage while crawling it; the database of these new links gets secluded for the crawling to index. That’s the key reason behind the significance of internal and external linking, as unlinked webpages are left abandoned among millions of dead web pages on the internet.
You can’t ignore the social media SEO while working on eCommerce product indexing on Google in the age of digital media. Search engines, including Google, consider social media signals crucial for ranking a product page.
Focus on social media SEO if you struggle to get product pages crawled and indexed by Google. Link building is vital to get new product pages crawled by the Google bots, as discussed earlier. Google does not categorize social media links as backlinks. Still, social media SEO can help your eCommerce products to get exposure, send social signals to Google, and earn backlinks from other content creators. It can indirectly help you to get all product pages indexed by Google.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is another crucial tool in Googlebots arsenal; It can take help from sitemaps to entirely crawl a website. Sitemaps are text or XML files, having a list of all web pages or product pages one wants google to crawl and index.
Sitemaps are like triggers; they let the eCommerce SEO team create a textual or XML site map and submit it via the Google search console to trigger Google crawlers. A perfectly crafted sitemap will trigger the web spiders to crawl all the web pages in a sitemap for indexing the new ones and updating the changes made in already indexed web pages. You can manually create 
the Site maps if you know the XML language or use the tools to generate XML sitemap files automatically.
Submitting a sitemap does not mean triggering the crawling process instantly. It may or may not take time to start the crawling process. And sitemap submission does not guarantee a website’s complete crawling; web spiders may leave the site without crawling all the webpages listed in a sitemap. It could be because of any error in XML files or web spider algorithm complexity. But, in most cases, Google bots will crawl all the webpages listed in a sitemap if XML files are perfectly crafted without any error.
How to facilitate Google for proper indexing and higher ranking?
Google bots not only crawl webpages for indexing, but they play a crucial role in deciding the webpages ranking on SERPs. Google bots or web crawlers note the particular tags’ content while crawling the web page. In the case of eCommerce sites, they keep an eye on product title tags and heading tags. You can send strong optimization signals to Google via web crawlers by writing organic keywords enriched titles and headings for products.
Google crawlers try to understand the e-commerce site structure and content to figure out the relatable category for that site. Precisely indexed product pages in a related category are a key to getting noticed by Google ranking algorithms for top SERPs.
You may focus on building a positive UI, UX website design, and user-friendly content to get a consistent position on Google’s first SERP. Ecommerce SEO experts suggest using organic keywords in product page headings and titles, but stuffing keywords artificially will compel Google metrics to consider your website spammy. And it could lead to de-ranking and abandoning web crawlers from future crawling.
Final Words | How does Google index E-commerce products?
Google uses hundreds of thousands of robotic software called Google bots, web crawlers, or spiders to crawl product pages for indexing. You may focus on the following two things to get your eCommerce products noticed by the Google bots,
- Internal and External link buildings on Product pages
- Submission of Sitemaps.
Sitemaps can let you trigger Google to crawl the particular product pages of an eCommerce site. While link building can help you to automate the crawling process as Google bots notice the new links on a webpage while crawling it. And use this database of new links to crawl later on.
