What is Indexing?

Hi,

What is “Indexing” under the SEO tab, and should I turn it on or off? Will this benefit my google rankings?

Hi @Shayfletcher,

Indexing basically means enabling Google to show your website in it’s search results. Not a good look to index domain.webflow.io if your main domain.com is live because most often it appears in search results before your actual domain.

Hope this helps.

Best,
Naweed

Hi Naweed,

So, I’d want to keep indexing off?

Thanks!

@Shayfletcher
You are referring to Webflows “index” feature.


The Webflow “index” feature is ON / ENABLED by DEFAULT.

Notice… mine is turned OFF / YES / DISABLED.

Also notice… Disabling the feature is “YES”… and enabling it is “NO”.

Webflow is using a negative aspect for this feature.

It should be “Enable Webflow Subdomain Indexing” - YES to enable or NO to disable.

NOT: Disable Webflow Subdomain Indexing". YES to disable or NO to enable.

I will add… every project I have… index is turned OFF. It’s basically the first thing I do when I create a new project. And I never enable it.

Your needs are probably different than mine… so you might consider enabling it.


This features allows you to control

  • whether or not search engines… (as @nwdsha indicated…) index your project or website.

If enabled (turned on)… search engines will attempt to crawl your project / website…
and in doing so… place the results of the crawl into their respective indexes.

If disabled (turned off)… search engines (supposedly… and we all trust Google to do right… right ?) will not attempt to crawl your project / website.


Side Note: Google


If your site (myproject.webflow.io) gets indexed… then you disable the index feature…

  • the results may eventually be removed from the search engines index. But that’s not a guarantee.

(NOTE)
Webflow states… they do not (currently) notify search engines of projects / websites.

However - In the past… I have had projects (under development)… get indexed by Google. And I didn’t want them to be indexed.

I have recommended to Webflow on numerous occasions… to have this default to OFF.

(keep in mind: unless they’ve change the setup - Even this discussion / post… as every post on this forum are indexed…)… take that thought process a little further and you should figure out where the conversation goes.

6 Likes

Holly smoke, this is important information when it comes to SEO…

Best ever reply @Revolution :+1:

May I ask if this are the settings that you recommend.
I might be mistaking wheter you mean the indexing should be blue or grey.