Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

How to See What Pages of Your Site Google Has In Its Index
by Tinu AbayomiPaul ©Copyright 2004

There is a lag time between the indexing or updating of your 
site, and the time it takes to show new results in the database. 
Depending on your site, where it was linked from, who it was 
linked from, and who knows what other factors, the amount of 
time varies. 
                                                
With the method I teach in my book it seems to take two to four 
days on average for the Googlebot to stop by initially, and then 
another two days to one week to appear in search listings for 
the first listing. 

(You can read more about the book here:
http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/book )

But even if it takes more than four to seven days for the
Googlebot spider to show up at your site, or to return, if
ever, there are several ways you can track the results. First, 
you can use Google itself. 

Go to www.google.com and type in site: then your domain name. 
So for yahoo.com, you'd type in "site:yahoo.com". 

The results will show you which pages of your site are showing 
up in Google.

If you know you won't have time to check on a daily basis, you 
can use a site called Google Alert, which you can find at:

http://www.googlealert.com 

The great thing about this site is that it will track up to five 
terms per email address and have them sent to you via email on a 
daily basis. Using this you can track your ranking for your most 
important terms, or see how often your competitor's site comes 
up versus yours. 

To use this to see when pages of your site come up, create an 
account, then in the search terms section, type in, as one word, 
whatever is between "www" and your site's suffix (.com, .net, 
.org, .biz, .uk, etc.) and you will start getting emailed 
results. 

The only problem is that the resulting page is sometimes a 
day behind Google's actual indexing. But for a free automated 
resource, you really can't beat it.

Until now. 

Google's new Web Alerts just came out on the 29th of March.
You can access it here: 

http://www.google.com/webalerts

You can use Google's new Web Alerts service in much the same 
way. It's currently in Beta development, so make sure you save 
the information sent to you. Since it's so new, you'll probably 
want to sign up to both services and compare the results. 

My favorite use for this is finding out when people mention my 
name or re-print my article at their sites, so that I can link 
back, or email to thank them. A big advantage of Google.com's 
in-house version of the web alerts system is that they have a 
news version that you can subscribe to, which will help you stay 
on top of your niche in whatever industry you're in.

Currently I use the Google Alert's site for several 
on-going searches, and Google's Beta Web Alert's for my most 
mission-critical, time-sensitive news.

There's yet another way to use Google to track how your site 
is doing in Google. It will tell you the cached version of your 
page, which Google stores. Sometimes the date posted next to the 
listing of the cached page can help give you a good estimate of 
when Google will be back at your site. 

For example, at the moment, I seem to see the spider most
predictably every day between midnight and 6 am EST since my 
home page began to score a PR of 5, then periodically at other 
points in my site during the day. I figured this out by looking 
at Google's cache of my home page over a period of one week.

This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to 
yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, 
and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. 
It's not 100% accurate, but it will give you a much better idea 
than you'd get from guessing - and it's free.

Go back to Google's home page - www.google.com - and type in 
info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com 
you'd type info:www.exactseek.com. You can also use 
site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been 
indexed by Google's search engine spider. 

Curiously, Google used to show different results for
info:www.exactseek.com and info:exactseek.com – instead of
including results for exactseek.com in the www evaluation.
I haven't seen this much anymore, but if you see one
permutation showing up in results for the other, you may
want to do both.
 
You're going to want to bookmark this page and visit it on
a weekly basis. The best day to look would be the one week
anniversary of what day Google last cached a page at your
site. The date will often be shown next to the word "cached" 
on one of your page results. If the cached page date is the 
same, that means Google hasn't been back to your site.

Marry this information with your study of your web stats to get 
more ideas on getting the most out of your weekly or daily 
exercises involving search engines and links from other sites, 
not just Google. 

================================================================
Tinu's adventure's with Google began when friends challenged her 
to "put her traffic where her site is". She was challenged to 
raise her brand-new site to top 100,000 status in Alexa and get 
well ranked in Google in 90 days, spending less than $100. When 
she won in 34 days, she decided to use the site she built to 
share her free traffic secrets. For more free traffic secrets, 
subscribe to her newsletter at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com 
or visit her site for more free articles like this :
http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com
================================================================

Copyright © 2004 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.