Google Index Status shows all the information Google knows about your site

Google recently introduced a new tool to its Webmaster’s console – the Google Index Status. This is a new menu item under the Health menu within Webmaster’s Tool. Clicking on the menu unfolds a goldmine of information regarding your website, that Google has.

This is a tool that reveals all the page index status information – which means it tells you how many pages Google has indexed from within your website in a historical pattern. Clicking on the Advanced tab gives you even more detailed information about how many pages were indexed, how many pages were not and blocked by Robots, how many abandoned etc.

Google Index Status – The Main Tab

  • Pages Ever crawled: This is the cumulative total of URLs on your site that Google has ever crawled. Not all crawled URLs get indexed, and Google may discover some URLs by other means such as inbound links from other sites. This number should increase over time as new pages are added to your site.
  • Total indexed: This is the total number of URLs currently in Google’s index. These URLs are available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google may discover by other means. This number will change over time, as new pages are added and indexed, and old pages are removed. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because it does not include URLs that have been identified as duplicates or non-canonical, or less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag.

On the Advanced Tab, you can see.

  • Number of Pages Blocked by robots: This is the total number of URLs that Google cannot crawl because they are disallowed in your robots.txt file.
  • Number of Pages Not selected: Pages that are not indexed because they are substantially similar to other pages, or that have been redirected to another URL.

How does Index Status data make sense to Webmasters?

The tool basically gives you the historical data of all the pages indexed, being indexed from your site. If at all anything, its a great way to stay on top of your site health, and detect problems with indexing issues early on.

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