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Google Webmaster Tools Adds Index Status

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Google Webmaster Tools will now let you know how many pages of your website are currently included in Google’s index. The new feature can be found by visiting the Health menu. Once there, you’ll find a graph with a year’s worth of data.

google-wmt-index-status

The Basic tab show the cumulative total of all URLs on your site crawled by Google, though not all crawled URLs get indexed.

If you need to go deeper to identify potential crawling or indexing issues, you can check out the Advanced tab to see how many pages Google:

  • Has crawled.
  • Knows about but can't crawl because it is blocked by your robots.txt file.
  • Has not included in its search results, either because they are "substantially similar" to other pages or they have been redirected to another URL.

google-wmt-index-status-advanced-tab

Counts are always totals, not the number of pages added in a particular day, Google noted in their blog post announcing the new feature.

Mainly, what Google says webmasters can learn from this graph is whether Google is indexing your content or having trouble doing so, and if you have a technical issue due to canonicalization, duplicate content, automatically generated pages, or hacking.

What do you think of this new Google Webmaster Tools feature?


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