#protips
Originally shared by Pierre Far
Index Status in Webmaster Tools for fun and profit
Yesterday we released Index Status in Webmaster Tools. In a nutshell, it's a way for webmasters to take a look at how their whole site is doing in Google's index. The official blog post is here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/behold-google-index-secrets-revealed.html
But as I'm a search geek who's very excited by this, I thought I'd give you my personal tour of the feature :)
There are two tabs: Basic and Advanced.
In Basic, we simply show a graph of the number of pages in our index. As you publish more content, and Googlebot discovers it, and everything is going well, this graph should keep showing an increase over time.
But what happens if suddenly this graph dips? Maybe you've mistakenly addeda a site-wide noindex meta tag. Or maybe you removed a large section of the site and the pages are returning 404 error codes. If this kind of drastic change is not intentional, then Index Status really helps you diagnose such site-wide issues. If it is intentional, Index Status helps you monitor the change.
The Advanced tab is where the real fun is! Here we give you four graphs:
1. Total Indexed: This is same graph in the Basic tab we talked just about.
2. Ever Crawled: This is a cumulative count the number of pages Googlebot has ever crawled successfully on your site. Each point on the graph is not the total crawling at the time point but the total up to that point.
3. Not Selected: These are pages that our algorithms chose to not index because they either redirect to other pages, have rel="canonical" pointing to other pages, or their content is substantially similar to other pages.
4. Blocked by robots.txt: Exactly what it says: it's the count of URLs at that point that are blocked by robots.txt, and therefore not crawled.
Here is key trick for using the Advanced tab: Don't look at one graph on its own, but look at how multiple graphs behave simultaneously. That is, look at the behaviour of a graph in context of other graphs. What do I mean?
Let's say you moved your site from one domain to another, and you did that by setting up 301 redirects between the sites. In this situation, the number of Indexed pages is supposed to drop and the number of Not Selected pages will go up, because you're telling our algorithms to select other URLs (the redirect targets). In short, you can use Index Status to watch how quickly our algorithms are picking up on the site move! Cool!
But let's say the Indexed count drops and the Not Selected count suddenly increases but you hadn't done anything site-wide. This could be a warning of a serious issue, like you've mistakenly added a site-wide rel="canonical" pointing to just one page.
This is just a brief tour. Please have a play with it in your Webmaster Tools account and if you have any questions/feedback/feature requests, please add them below or on our forums. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :)
Originally shared by Pierre Far
Index Status in Webmaster Tools for fun and profit
Yesterday we released Index Status in Webmaster Tools. In a nutshell, it's a way for webmasters to take a look at how their whole site is doing in Google's index. The official blog post is here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/behold-google-index-secrets-revealed.html
But as I'm a search geek who's very excited by this, I thought I'd give you my personal tour of the feature :)
There are two tabs: Basic and Advanced.
In Basic, we simply show a graph of the number of pages in our index. As you publish more content, and Googlebot discovers it, and everything is going well, this graph should keep showing an increase over time.
But what happens if suddenly this graph dips? Maybe you've mistakenly addeda a site-wide noindex meta tag. Or maybe you removed a large section of the site and the pages are returning 404 error codes. If this kind of drastic change is not intentional, then Index Status really helps you diagnose such site-wide issues. If it is intentional, Index Status helps you monitor the change.
The Advanced tab is where the real fun is! Here we give you four graphs:
1. Total Indexed: This is same graph in the Basic tab we talked just about.
2. Ever Crawled: This is a cumulative count the number of pages Googlebot has ever crawled successfully on your site. Each point on the graph is not the total crawling at the time point but the total up to that point.
3. Not Selected: These are pages that our algorithms chose to not index because they either redirect to other pages, have rel="canonical" pointing to other pages, or their content is substantially similar to other pages.
4. Blocked by robots.txt: Exactly what it says: it's the count of URLs at that point that are blocked by robots.txt, and therefore not crawled.
Here is key trick for using the Advanced tab: Don't look at one graph on its own, but look at how multiple graphs behave simultaneously. That is, look at the behaviour of a graph in context of other graphs. What do I mean?
Let's say you moved your site from one domain to another, and you did that by setting up 301 redirects between the sites. In this situation, the number of Indexed pages is supposed to drop and the number of Not Selected pages will go up, because you're telling our algorithms to select other URLs (the redirect targets). In short, you can use Index Status to watch how quickly our algorithms are picking up on the site move! Cool!
But let's say the Indexed count drops and the Not Selected count suddenly increases but you hadn't done anything site-wide. This could be a warning of a serious issue, like you've mistakenly added a site-wide rel="canonical" pointing to just one page.
This is just a brief tour. Please have a play with it in your Webmaster Tools account and if you have any questions/feedback/feature requests, please add them below or on our forums. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :)
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