Search engine indexing

Indexing is a search engine finding your pages, reading them, and adding them to the results it can show people. Being indexed is the prerequisite for ranking at all.

Your free address is deliberately kept out of search

Every site gets a free address ending in onbrightsite.com. That address is intentionally excluded from search results. This is on purpose and it is not a limitation of your plan.

The reason is duplicate content. If both yourbusiness.onbrightsite.com and yourbusiness.com showed the same pages in search results, search engines would see two identical sites and have to pick which one counts. That split works against you, and the one they pick may not be the one you want customers landing on.

Keeping the free address out of search means your custom domain is the only version competing, so everything a search engine learns about your site accrues to the address you actually want people using.

The free address still works normally. You can visit it, share it with a colleague, and use it while you build. It just will not turn up in search results.

The practical consequence: if you want to be found in search, connect a custom domain. A site living only on its free address will not appear in results no matter how good the content is. See Custom domains.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a list of your pages in a format search engines read. Rather than following links and hoping to find everything, a search engine can read the sitemap and know what exists.

BrightSite generates yours and keeps it current. Publish a page and it is added. Unpublish one and it comes out. You do not maintain it and you do not need to think about it.

Only published pages appear. Drafts are not in the sitemap, which is exactly right, because a draft is not meant to be public.

If you use a tool like a search engine's webmaster console, you can submit your sitemap address there. That is optional. Search engines find sitemaps on their own.

Instant Indexing

Normally a search engine comes back to your site on its own schedule to check for changes. That might be daily for a busy site, or much less often for a small one. Until they come back, your change is invisible to search.

Instant Indexing, also called IndexNow, flips that round. When you publish or change something, BrightSite tells participating search engines directly that this address has changed. They can then come and look sooner rather than waiting for their next scheduled visit.

You will find it in the Instant Indexing settings, on the SEO → Structured Data screen. It is a setting for the whole organization rather than part of your site identity, and once it is on it runs by itself.

It does nothing until your custom domain is live

This is the part that catches people out. Instant Indexing only sends anything once your custom domain is connected and verified as live. Until then it is inert. You can switch it on, but no notifications go out, because the free onbrightsite.com address is excluded from search anyway and there would be nothing useful to tell a search engine about.

So the order is: connect your custom domain, wait for it to go live, and then Instant Indexing starts working. If you turned it on while still on your free address, you do not need to do anything more. It begins once the domain is live.

What it does and does not do

• It shortens the delay before a search engine knows something changed.
• It does not make you rank higher.
• It does not guarantee a page gets indexed. That is still the search engine's decision.
• It has no effect on the free onbrightsite.com address, which is excluded from search regardless.

It is most useful when a change is time-sensitive: corrected prices, changed opening hours, a page you need visible for something happening soon.

How long indexing takes

Set your expectations realistically. A brand new site on a brand new domain can take weeks before it appears properly in results. An established site publishing a new page is usually faster, often days.

Nothing you do forces this. Instant Indexing helps at the margins. Publishing repeatedly to try to hurry it along does not, and republishing a page over and over is not useful.

Publish the page, make sure it is on your custom domain, and let it settle.

Related

• Custom domains
• SEO basics
• Structured data
• Redirects