Jan 4, 2010

SEO: Indexed pages

Pages indexed by Google is one of the most important factors in SEO. What's interesting is that Google does "see" all pages on a site but it does not include all of them in its index. Yahoo, on the other hand, seems to index all pages that it sees.

To find what Google has indexed on your site, go to Google and then type in the search bar the following: site:www.yoursite.com . Note, there is no space after "site:"

But note that this will not work with the "link" operator. In fact, the best way to see what Google has on you is to go to their Webmaster Central, signup and add your site. Once you get the ownership of your site confirmed, you can run a lot of vital statistics on your site using Google's tools. And you will get a lot of valuable information.

To find what pages Yahoo has indexed, go to Yahoo site explorer and enter the URL of your site in the very top search bar. The difference between Google and Yahoo is usually quite stunning.

Unfortunately, there is only partial control over how to make Google index more of your pages.

One of the most common SEO tips for page indexing is to create a Site Map, put it a link to it on your home page, and ensure that the Site Map contains links to all other pages of your website. The second SEO tip is to have no more than 3 levels in your site's navigational hierarchy.
And the third SEO tip is to interlink your site's internal pages as detailly as possible. Together, these three SEO tips will ensure that more of your site's pages get indexed by Google.

In my experience, I noticed that websites that are using a content management system (CMS) of some sort - such as Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress - get much "deeper" indexing by Google. In addition, using a CMS like Joomla, for example, allows you to install a Site map component which automatically creates a Site Map page and lists links to all your other pages on it. All new pages are added automatically and all archived pages are removed automatically as well - which is very convenient. Both Joomla and many of its components are free and very easy to use.

So, if you want to have more of your pages indexed by Google without too much work, I suggest you use Joomla and install a Site Map component (Xmap is the one I like).

And if you need help, do not hesitate to contact me vi my Ottawa SEO site.