How Do You Know if Your Site Content has been Indexed?

Google’s index of the web is immense and that is probably a huge understatement. If you think about it there are billions of pages on the internet today and Google is keeping an index of basically every piece of content and every piece of information on every page of the web that their algorithm thinks would be a useful result for someone’s search that’s just a huge amount of data.

How do you know if your site content has been indexed?

The most straightforward and quickest way to know if your site content has been indexed is you have to go to Google search and type in site:yourwebsitename.com. Then you will show your website and all URL pages or posts that are indexed in the Google search engine. Along with the Google Search Console, you can also use Google Index Checker. The Google Index Checker is a free SEO and page indexing checker tool offered by Linkody most used to determine if a web page or a website URL is indexed by Google or not.

Unfortunately, we don’t have access to filter through that index directly to figure out if our content shows up there or not and How to check if a website is indexed by Google. So in this blog post, I want to walk you through exactly how to know if a piece of content from your website is showing up in Google’s index.

Now in case you missed it I just did another blog post on why Google may not be indexing some of the content on your website In this one I want to focus on how to know for sure if the content on your site has been indexed.

And then in another blog post shortly I’ll be talking about what to do to give your content the best chance of being indexed by Google. So make sure you don’t miss that blog post that’s going to be coming out soon.

For today’s topic, there are actually two really easy ways to determine which content on your website has been indexed by Google. Now in my previous blog post, I talked about how long it takes for content to typically get indexed by Google.

So if you just published an article and it doesn’t show up in these tools that I’m about to show you. You don’t worry too much about it give it a little bit of time but as more time passes if it’s not showing up it’s definitely going to be beneficial to you to read that other blog and learn what to do to make sure that google’s going to index it.

In fact, maybe read it anyway and do those things proactively that way you can get your content in Google’s index as quickly as possible.

1. For Discovering If Your Articles Are Setting Indexed

Tool number one is actually Google’s search itself. We’re going to use this in conjunction with another tool that we like to use that we just create ourselves which is our own search analysis our own hit list of content that we plan to write but also that is a history of the articles that we have written.

Let me show you how this works. I type in the site colon and then the URL for my website. You can see I’ve already done this cook4folks.com.

What it’s going to do is it’s going to give me a listing of all of the pages all of the web pages that exist for this website in Google’s index you can see here that it says about 280 results.

The first one here is the home page well that’s not one of my articles. So let’s say I had 280 articles This is already telling me that one of my articles is maybe not indexed. You’ll also see here that I have a cook4folks.com recipe.

Well, that’s just basically a category of blog posts. I also have author pages for each one of the different authors or writers on my website. There’s also a blog archive page blog page 2 blog page 3 etc. so let’s go on to page 2 here you know blog pages 13 10 18.

Oh, I finally got to an article on why pizza has grease. So first you know 19 of the first 20 search results are not articles on my website.

What I can do here is compare the number that they gave me 280 subtracting out you know obviously many of those pages that exist on the site but that aren’t the content that I specifically wrote for ranking. Compare that number with how many blog posts I’ve published on the site and at least see if we’re close the number of articles published on the site at this time is a hundred and five. So I have 105 blog posts.

Google is indexing probably most of those as well as numerous other pages The privacy policy is the About Us page many of those pages by the way will probably get de-indexed over time if they don’t ever show up in search results for people. Google does that when a page just never matches a search query, so eventually, it might just take it out.

The other thing you can often do with an SEO plugin is index or request that it not be indexed things like category pages as well as media files. The next thing that I can do then is I can go through this list here you know one page at a time.

I can just click not click on each article but look at each article that’s showing up and check it off of my hit list of those articles that I know I’ve already written. I can just check those off and I can see if there’s one that’s missing.

You can see that this process could become really cumbersome when you have 100 or more articles on your website but if you have 30 or 40 it might not be so bad.

Google search console

There is another way and I like this way a lot. Google actually gives us another tool. This tool is a Google search console. Now if you don’t know what Google search console is or you don’t have it set up yet. I have a little blog post on this where I walk you through the process of setting up a Google search console. It’s pretty straightforward but it can be a little bit tricky to get it connected.

Google for Small Business post said:

“Google Search Console is a powerful tool that can answer a lot of your questions around your website and Google search. For example, you can find out: How many users visit your website from search? What search terms did they use to find your website? How does your website look on Google search?”

What it’s going to do? Is it going to let you know if there are errors on your site, errors that can impact your seo, if you’re trying to use schema markup they’re going to let you know about any warnings or errors, there they’re going to let you know how your site’s doing from a page experience perspective.

This is a whole report here on page experience.

Where they’re going to walk you through your core web vitals mobile usability and security https. Those are the three main elements right now of page experience. You can click on each one and get a report to make sure that your site’s doing very well Obviously the site is doing very well, so we’re good. What we’re going to look at right now is this coverage section.

I have a coverage report now it’s telling me that there are no errors.

So I don’t have any pages that are not being covered in the index because of some error on the page. It shows that I have 135 valid pages it doesn’t quite match the 190 results that I saw just a second ago. Again it’s kind of in the ballpark and then I have 213 excluded pages Well.

Those are pages that Google has crawled but has chosen to not index. I might want to look at those I’m going to click on the valid ones first and I can click on this.

I can see a list here of articles that Google has indexed. It says indexed not submitted in sitemap.

Now I have submitted a sitemap to Google and that’s something I’m going to show you more about in my next blog post how to do as well as several other steps to make sure your content has the best chance of being indexed by Google. So these are in the sitemap but Google found them on its own.

Simply because of the way I have the site set up and the way that I just write my content. Now I’m going to click on excluded.

I want to see how many pages and why they’re not being included here. Now I have somewhere it says alternate page with the proper canonical tag. These are pages where there’s another version of that page that’s the more official version and so Google says Okay well. If there are multiple pages that are the same that’s the one that we’re going to put in our index. We’re not going to put the other one in there.

Let’s look at the page with redirect www.cookforfox.com redirects to cook4folks.com.

So they just don’t include that in their index of all these HTTP versions of the site. They all redirect to the https which is a good thing so they’re not including those in the index. I have nothing to worry about there. Here’s one where it says duplicate without user-selected canonical.

This one where I didn’t basically I haven’t put in a link telling Google this is the more authoritative version of the same page but these are feed pages that are RSS feeds.

Excluded That Say Crawled Currently Not Indexed

I’m not worried about any of those either. Let’s look at the ones that are excluded that say crawled currently not indexed.

These are the ones that could be a problem for me they’ve been crawled on the site Google’s found them but it’s chosen to not put them in their index. Sometimes it’s just a time frame they’ve crawled it they just haven’t indexed it yet but if enough time has passed if it’s been a few weeks it’s been crawled but it’s not being indexed.

These are the articles that we’re potentially going to want to look at and follow some of the steps I’m going to talk about in that next blog post. Here as I scroll through I see several right off the bat. These are feeds these first four are all feeds. let’s click on one so you can see what I’m talking about.

So if I click on that it’s going to open in a new tab I’m just getting this XML file right.

That’s just it’s an RSS feed that’s I don’t care if that’s in Google’s index or not but there are a couple on this page that I see that are actual normal articles. So what’s the difference between red beans and kidney beans? let’s go look at that one Okay here’s a normal article on the website.

I would expect this article to show up in Google’s index there’s nothing about it that should make it not be indexed by Google. So I can add this one to my list of articles to maybe go look at and try to figure out why that might be. As we go back you’ll see also on this page I have some of these others like cook4folks.com detroit you know.

What is this this has nothing to do with the content on my site. It’s not an actual page and so it’s a URL that exists for some reason but isn’t a page and I don’t care for it to be indexed.

Anyway, we’ll go on to the next page and I’ll show you we’ve got a whole bunch here… These are just you know javascript things okay we’ve got another article here I click on it I click inspect url I’m going to get that report.

Now what it’s going to tell me is it’s discovered in the site map. It’s being referred to by other pages on the site these are all good practices things we’ll talk about in more detail in the next blog post it’s just going to give me all this information and here it says crawl aloud yes.

So I don’t have any issues with the robots.txt files on my site telling the search engines to not index it because it tells me that the crawl is allowed and that the indexing is allowed.

Request Indexing In Google Search Console

Basically, there shouldn’t be any reason why this page could not be indexed so what I’ll do at this point is click request indexing.

Now it can take a minute for Google to go ahead and process that and then it’s not immediately going to be indexed and in fact, even here there’s no guarantee that they’re going to index it at all.

Support.google.com article stated that

“You can request detailed Google index information about a URL in your property, including indexability, any rich results or videos found, mobile usability, and more.”

However, this step can just help to get it to kind of priority to be checked and potentially added to Google’s index. The other thing they say is don’t request again you don’t need to click it over and over again it specifically said it’s not going to increase the chances or move it up in the queue or anything like that just request the indexing one time. Now this isn’t a step I do with every article that I publish on the website.

There are people who will tell you yeah every time I publish an article I come in here I do a URL inspection and I go ahead and request indexing and Google has specifically said that isn’t going to increase the chances of it being indexed and may not even increase the speed of it being indexed.

In most cases and so I choose to spend my time focused a little bit more on the creation of the content especially when I’m new on a website starting a brand new one rather than focusing on trying to make sure I get the outcome as quickly as possible.

Frankly, it’s going to make very little difference but what it’s going to do is probably mess with your mind a bit and get you really really hyper-focused on outcomes. When at that point you want to be focusing more on input.

Those are really the best ways to check whether or not your content has been indexed by Google if it shows up here in the Google search console. You can rest assured it is in the Google index but remember I shared this in the other blog post Just because it’s in the index doesn’t mean it’s ever going to show up in the rankings.

That’s what the rest of this blog website is really about creating the type of content that does very well in Google’s rankings. That’s what SEO is that’s what we do here. So a few action steps to take from here first go to your own site and check the coverage in the Google search console, If you haven’t set up the Google search console again make sure you set it up right now. So that you’re going to be able to do this in the near future.

Then go check out that coverage and see how you’re doing, How are you doing Is most of your content indexed, or is stuff being missed that you may have written a while back If so let’s go request indexing.

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