Is Your Website Getting Indexed?

November 14, 2007 // Drew Stauffer

How often do you check to see what pages are indexed by each search engine? If you’re not checking on a regular basis you could be in for a surprise. Yes, Google is the dominant search engine, but Yahoo, MSN and Ask are still going to bring you a decent amount of traffic.

We recently re-organized an older site and re-wrote all the content to optimize it for a new set of specific keywords. After 301 re-directing the old pages and submitting the XML sitemaps to Google, I gave it some time to see what pages were going to get indexed.

Three weeks later Google and MSN had indexed all the new pages but Yahoo only had the home page indexed. I authenticated the site with Yahoo and added their META tag in hopes to correct the problem. No dice.Two weeks later, Yahoo still only had the homepage indexed.

I decided the easiest way to get Yahoo to index my pages was to send some easy inbound links to it. I added a post to this blog sending five links to the sub pages of the site, you can read it here. Within three days, Yahoo indexed the five new pages that I linked to.

Keep track of what pages you have indexed on each search engine and you can better serve the most relevant results to users. Also keep in mind that not every page is worth getting indexed. Pages like Terms of Use and Privacy Policy usually don’t add too much exciting content, so don’t clog up your results with useless pages.

When your checking statistics on previous sites that you’ve launched, what are some ways that you make sure your getting results?

UPDATE: Once Yahoo indexed the five new interior pages, the remainder of the 12 interior pages were indexed two days later.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo indexing, inbound links, website optimization

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4 responses so far ↓

3 Energy Conservation // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:13 am

My website has been indexed but Title and Meta Details are not being updated in Google? What to do? Does social bookmarking will ping website in search engine effectively?
4 Drew Stauffer // Feb 9, 2009 at 1:52 pm

@ Energy Conservation

Your title and meta info is going to get updated the next time Google crawls your site.

The quickest way I’ve found to get that stuff updated is to send a few links to your pages from an external site. But depending on how often that site gets crawled you could still have to wait a little while.

If you look at your log files you’ll be able to tell how often the bots are coming to your site to give a basic idea of how long you’ll have to wait.