Some of the Weejee Media Pages Indexed by Google
The Google footprint for a business can be determined the same way we determine a footprint for an individual: simply type the business name into the search bar. But if the business has a website, there are even more ways to measure its footprint.
The search engines offer advanced operators to help you refine and improve your search and help you research how your site is doing. And they’re easy.
Which Pages of My Site Are Being Indexed?
It’s always good to know which pages of your site the search engines are indexing, or more importantly, which ones they’re not. After all, if a page is not being indexed, it will not come up in any search results. To find out which pages of your site are being indexed, use the “site:” operator.
In a Google search field (not the address bar), type “site:YOURSITE.com” without the quotes and with no spaces, and no “www.” Then press enter/return. You’ll see at the top the total number of pages that have been indexed by Google, and most of those pages will be listed in the results.
Who’s Linking to My Website?
One of the most important factors search engines consider when calculating the relevance of a page is how many other websites link to it. How many websites link to pages on your site? Again, it’s easy to find out.
Go to Yahoo! (not Google), and in the search field, not the address bar, type this:
link:http://www.YOURSITE.com
The results will include pages from elsewhere on the Web that link to pages on your site. The more links you have from reputable sites, particularly sites that are related to yours in some way, the higher the search engines will rank your site.
Website Navigation
If you see that the search engines do not index a lot of your pages, there’s a good chance they’ve never seen them. Good site navigation is not only important to users, it’s important to the search engines as well. Make sure links to all the pages on your site are no more than two clicks away. If possible, create a sitemap and link to it from the footer of each page. Your visitor will love it, and so will the search engines.
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Excellent article and links, love the ‘footprint’ concept.
It is very useful to see not only how many pages on your web site have been indexed, but also who is linking to those pages – you might be surprised to find where links to your site show up, and how you can use this information. For example, I found a complimentary link to one of my sites from a developer’s blog, and using a redirector plugin sent traffic from that blog to a more detailed article on the subject, complete with an email opt-in box for more information. On another site, I found that one infoworld.com article had been translated into 3 other languages.
Great info, very useful tools!