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Home / Search Engine Optimization / How to Evaluate Pages Indexed in Google for SEO

How to Evaluate Pages Indexed in Google for SEO

March 23, 2015 By John E Lincoln

SEO professionals go about doing certain tasks in different ways. One of those, is evaluating how many pages you have in the Google index for SEO. In this post, we reveal real insight from Google on how to find how many pages your website has in the index.

How to Evaluate Pages Indexed in Google for SEO

How to Evaluate Pages Indexed in Google for SEO

Site Operators in Search

One of the older methods for finding out how many pages you have in the Google index is to do a site query. A “site:” query is one of the oldest Google advanced search operators. It will allow you to see very roughly how many pages are in the index. While this is the case, Google’s John Mueller from Google says, “The site query is more like a very, very, very rough number which can be a few orders of magnitude off, so plus or minus a couple zeros at the end, so as an SEO I wouldn’t focus on that and I don’t think it makes it very actionable.”

So as you can see, the site query operator is really not very useful at this point, except for rough numbers.

Webmaster Tools Index Status

Another way to check the number of indexed pages is to look at the index status report in webmaster tools. However, this has issues too. According to Mueller, “The index status report is essentially the correct number of pages that we (Google) have indexed. But that can be misleading because it shows everything that Google has run accords on a website, which could include a lot of duplicate content and a lot of things that you really don’t care about.”

So as we can see, this report is much better than the site operator query option, but at the same time there are still issues. Specifically, if there is duplicate content on the website and Google indexes that it will be reported here.

Sitemap Index Report

The sitemap index report in Webmaster Tools is the recommended option from Google. According to Mueller, “Personally I prefer the site maps count, because that’s something where you can submit the URLs that you really care about. You can say, these are URLs that I actually do want to have indexed at the moment and we look at those exact URLs.”

So as we can see, if you really want to understand your website’s ability to be indexed based on the URLs you are actively promoting, this is the best way.

One issue with the sitemaps index report is that you cannot export the pages that were indexed or were not indexed. This is a feature that webmasters have been asking for, but Google has yet to deliver.

Muller comments, “No, not at the moment. So we had that as one of the wishes submitted with the wish list we did early this year. But at the moment, that’s not something that you can do directly in Webmaster Tools. What you can do is narrow things down on your side if you want to take the time to do that. So you can submit multiple sitemap files, or course. And you can separate the URLs on your site into logical sets of sitemap files where you will say, well, these are all my category pages. These are all my product pages and that way, you can narrow things down a little bit.”

Summing up Indexed Pages in Google

Right now, there is not a perfect way to see all the pages indexed in Google, but these are some pretty good options. By using all three of these methods, understanding each of their limitations and spot checking important sections, you can do a good job seeing what is in the index and what is now. In addition, I encourage you to look at the top URLs you have ranking in tools like SEM Rush. Also, if something is not ranking make sure to run a check with fetch as Googlebot.

Sources

  • English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout. March 13, 2015

About John E Lincoln

John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, "The Forecaster Method" and "Digital Influencer." Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.

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About The Editor

John E Lincoln, CEO

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, one of the top digital marketing agencies in the nation and a 6x Inc. 5,000 company. Lincoln is consistently named one of the top marketing experts in the industry. He has been recipient of the Search Engine Land "Search Marketer of the Year" award, named the #1 SEO consultant in the USA by Clutch.co, most admired CEO and 40 under 40. Lincoln has written two books (The Forecaster Method and Digital Influencer) and made two movies (SEO: The Movie and Social Media Marketing: The Movie) on digital marketing. He is a digital marketing strategy adviser to some of the biggest names in business. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a major contributor, he does not write all of the articles.

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