How to use Google Webmaster Tools to check that your pages are indexed properly.

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One of our SEO Training Course Customers recently asked how to check that his pages were being indexed properly by Google. This is an important issue because sometimes your Content Management System (CMS) or Shopping Cart might have more pages in it than Google knows about. Obviously Google won’t display pages that it doesn’t know about.

Here is how to find out if Google is indexing all of your content.

  1. Find out how many pages there are in your CMS [See Note 1]
  2. Login to your Google Webmasters Control Panel
  3. Go to the [Optimization > Sitemap] menu option [See Screen Shot 1]
  4. You will see a graph showing [Links Submitted] and [Links Indexed]
  5. First check that the [Links Submitted] are equal to the pages in your CMS [See Note 2]
  6. Next check that the [Links Indexed] are also equal to the [Links Submitted] [See Note 3]
webmaster tools site map screen shot

webmaster tools site map screen shot

Note 1:

All CMS and Shopping Carts are different and you’ll need to find out the exact process from your web developer.

Note 2:

If the [Links Submitted] do not equal the links (or pages) in your CMS then there is something wrong with your sitemap generator (assuming you have one). If you don’t have a sitemap generator then you might need to create a sitemap from scratch using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and submit it in the usual way.

Note 3:

If the [Links Indexed] do not equal the [Links Submitted] then there must be crawl errors. Go to [Health > Sitemap] to check. If there are crawl errors then it is likely you will need technical help from your web developer.

Example 1

[Pages in CMS] = 300
[Links Submitted] = 100
[Links Indexed] = 100

Here you would have a Site Map generator problem. See Note 2 above.

Example 2

[Pages in CMS] = 300
[Links Submitted] = 300
[Links Indexed] = 100

Here you would have crawl errors. See Note 3 above.

Example 3

[Pages in CMS] = 300
[Links Submitted] = 200
[Links Indexed] = 100

Here you would have a Site Map generator problem and crawl errors. See Notes 2/3 above.