Google has recently released one more important secret which reveals the number of pages of a particular website that has been indexed by Google. This has been a mystery since a long time and webmasters were always curious about how many WebPages were actually indexed by Google. They only got a rough estimate of the indexed pages, but with the release of this new feature on Google Webmaster tools, website owners are really able to get a fair idea about the number of pages indexed by Google.
The new feature in Google Webmaster Tools is known as “Index Status” and you can view this option once you log into the dashboard of your Google Webmaster account. Once you log into your webmaster account, go to the link named “Health” on the left hand side and once you click on this link, you can see more sub links opening right there. Among the sub-links you can see the option “Index Status” and you have to click on this link to see more about the index status of your website.
Once you click on the link “Index Status” you will be able to see a graph which shows the total number of indexed pages against every month. Above the graph there are two tabs named “Basic” and “Advanced” and by default you will be landed on the basic report. If you click on the Advanced report you will be able to see more advanced reports with certain parameters.
The parameters that are shown in the Advanced reports are:
a) Total indexed
This parameter shows the total number of URLs of the website that has been indexed by Google. This number will change over the course of time as new pages of the website will be indexed by Google. Some of the old pages might be deleted from the list, which makes the list changing consistently.
b) Ever crawled
This is the total number of URLs that has been crawled by Google, but not necessarily indexed. This is mainly because Google does not index URLs which it identifies as duplicates, non-canonical, less useful and those which have a meta noindex tag. This number is therefore expected to be much more than the Total indexed URLs.
c) Not selected
The number which appears in the Not Selected parameters provides the number of URLs which are not at all selected for indexing due to similarity with other pages or other canonical issues.
d) Blocked by robots
This parameter denotes the number of URLs that are not indexed mainly because they are blocked by robots.txt file. This number is generally much lower than the other three parameters mentioned above.
The Index Status report is sure to provide more insight for the webmasters and help them in optimizing the websites in a much better way. This will give a clear idea about what is going on with their site in Google’s search index and the webmasters can act accordingly and step up their SEO activities to a higher level.
Finally Google listened to the majority. I’m excited to see how far Google will improve this feature to further help webmasters and seo’s analyze their respective sites faster and easier. Thanks George!