|
How to See What Pages of Your Site Google
Has In Its Index
Copyright 2004 Tinu AbayomiPaul
There is a lag time between the indexing or updating of
your site, and the time it takes to show new results in
the
database. Depending on your site, where it was linked
from,
who it was linked from, and who knows what other factors,
the amount of time varies.
With the method I teach in my book it seems to take two
to
four days on average for the Googlebot to stop by
initially, and then another two days to one week to
appear
in search listings for the first listing.
(You can read more about the book here:
But even if it takes more than four to seven days for the
Googlebot spider to show up at your site, or to return,
if
ever, there are several ways you can track the results.
First, you can use Google itself.
name. So for yahoo.com, you’d type in “site:yahoo.com”.
The results will show you which pages of your site are
showing up in Google.
If you know you won’t have time to check on a daily
basis,
you can use a site called Google Alert, which you can
find
at
The great thing about this site is that it will track up
to
five terms per email address and have them sent to you
via
email on a daily basis. Using this you can track your
ranking for your most important terms, or see how often
your competitor’s site comes up versus yours.
To use this to see when pages of your site come up,
create
an account , then in the search terms section, type in,
as
one word, whatever is between “www” and your site’s
suffix
(.com, .net, .org, .biz, .uk, etc.) and you will start
getting emailed results.
The only problem is that the resulting page is sometimes
a
day behind Google’s actual indexing. But for a free
automated resource, you really couldn’t beat it.
Until now.
Google’s new Web Alerts just came out on the 29th of
March.
You can access it here:
You can use Google’s new Web Alerts service in much the
same way. It’s currently in Beta development, so make
sure
you save the information sent to you. Since it’s so new,
you’ll probably want to sign up to both services and
compare the results.
My favorite use for this is finding out when people
mention
my name or re-print my article at their sites, so that I
can link back, or email to thank them. A big advantage
Google.com’s in-house version of the web alerts system is
that they have a news version that you can subscribe to,
which will help you stay on top of your niche in whatever
industry you’re in.
Currently I use the Google Alert’s site for several
on-going searches, and Google’s Beta Web Alert’s for my
most mission-critical, time-sensitive news.
There’s yet another way to use Google to track how your
site is doing in Google. It will tell you the cached
version of your page, which Google stores. Sometimes the
date posted next to the listing of the cached page can
help
give you a good estimate of when Google will be back at
your site.
For example, at the moment, I seem to see the spider most
predictably every day between midnight and 6 am EST since
my home page began to score a PR of 5, then periodically
at
other points in my site during the day. I figured this
out
by looking at Google’s cache of my home page over a
period
of one week.
This search will tell you pages that Google considers
similar to yours. It will also show sites that it
considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your
full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate, but
it will give you a much better idea than you’d get from
guessing- and it’s free.
in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was
also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which
pages
have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.
Curiously, Google used to show different results for
including results for exactseek.com in the www
evaluation.
I haven’t seen this much anymore, but if you see one
permutation showing up in results for the other, you may
want to do both.
You’re going to want to bookmark this page and visit it
on
a weekly basis. The best day to look would be the one
week
anniversary of what day Google last cached a page at your
site. The date will often be shown next to the word
“cached” on one of your page results. If the cached page
date is the same, that means Google hasn’t been back to
your site.
Marry this information with your study of your web stats
to
get more ideas on getting the most out of your weekly or
daily exercises involving search engines and links from
other sites, not just Google.
About the Author:
Tinu's adventure's with Google began when friends
challenged her to "put her traffic where her site is".
She
was challenged to raise her brand-new site to top 100,000
status in Alexa and get well ranked in Google in 90 days,
spending less than $100. When she won in 34 days,
she
decided to use the site she built to share her free
traffic
secrets. For more free traffic secrets, subscribe to her
site for more free articles like this :
| 
