How to Check If My Website is Indexed by Google

2017.08.30

MageNet Team

(23 votes, average: 4.65 out of 5)

“Is my site indexed? I think it has something to do with SEO. But my website is optimized…I guess. I’d prefer to find out how to increase my earnings with the ads!”

Do you know that the number of indexed pages can actually influence the amount of money you can earn by placing ads? And do you know how MageNet can help you add your pages to the index faster?

First of all,

What is index?

To put it shortly, index is a huge database Google uses to store the information about every web page it has analyzed. The process of this analysis is called “crawling”, you must have heard this word.

Why is it important to be indexed?

If a website hasn’t been crawled and is not presented in the index, it simply doesn’t exist to the search engine.

This means that the next time someone searches for the information that you have on your site, it won’t be returned to the user in the SERP. Because, once again, to the search engine your website (or some of its pages) simply doesn’t exist.

Number of indexed pages and ads placement

As you become a publisher the importance of crawled pages increases because your income depends on them. How?

When someone orders an ad to be placed on your website’s page, they may ask it to be placed on a particular page. Usually, it’s the page which is the most relevant to the subject of the ad.

If your site hasn’t been properly indexed, there are two options, both equally unfavorable for you.

You have a highly relevant web page that could be the home for the ad. It could be a good source of profit, but for the search engine and our database, it’s invisible. So we can’t suggest it to the advertiser.
You had a page relevant for the ad and it was properly indexed. However, you deleted it for some reason, and the crawlers haven’t updated the index yet. They think that you still have the page and we display this page to the advertiser as relevant. When an advertiser wants to place an ad on this page, you may realize that the page no longer exists and lose potential income.

In both ways, the situation is quite inconvenient for you and the advertisers. To avoid this, we advise you to regularly check how many pages Google has indexed on your website.

How to know if my site is indexed by Google?

It’s hard to say the exact amount of time that takes Google to index a website. The general idea is that it’s usually 4 days to 4 weeks, but the exceptions happen and there were a couple of examples when it took less than 4 days for a new site to be indexed.

Checking the overall number of indexed pages on your site is quite easy. Go to Google and type “site:url”, where “url” is your website address. For example, you can check the number of pages Google has indexed on CNN by typing in “site:cnn.com”

“Okay, now I know where to see the number of my indexed pages. But how do I make sure my site is indexed in the right way?” – you ask.

Previously we put together several articles about each of the tools you can use to help your site get indexed properly.

Creating a sitemap is the first step. Sitemap is a document containing all the info about your website structure and its pages. It comes really handy if you want crawlers to have an easy access to the data about your site. It also improves overall indexation of your site. There are two types of sitemaps that you can create, you can read about both of them and learn how to create a sitemap in our article on the topic.
Next thing to make is robots.txt file. This one will guide the search engine crawlers within your site’s structure. It will tell the crawlers not to pay attention to some parts of the site if you want them to be “unseen”. Setting up a robots.txt file may take some time, and we have some help for you in a related article describing essential syntax you may need to use and some other tips.
Additionally, you can make general improvements to your website which will help Google better crawl it and possibly rank it higher. It doesn’t influence the number of pages indexed by Google but can provide better results for your SERP position and, eventually, your income.

Post unique content. Use plagiarism checkers, spend more time looking for cutting edge stories. Avoid duplicates by setting your robots.txt correctly if you need to.
Beware of keyword spam
Control crawlers’ access to the site

You can read more about each of these in MageNet blog post concerning Google index and make necessary changes.

It can happen, though, that some of your pages are not available for ads placement. It can be for different reasons, and we suggest you reading this article to find out the reasons for “Not listed” or “Blocked” status of your pages.

Use MageNet to manually update the number of indexed pages

And, finally, some practical tip you can try straight away. On MageNet we have a reindexing option, which you can use once every 2 weeks.

It allows you not to wait until our system automatically indexes all of your pages, but do it manually and be sure your site listing is up-to-date.

To update the number of indexed pages, go to “Your sites” – “Already added sites” and use the necessary button: