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How to Use the New ‘Index Status’ Feature in Google Webmaster Tools

How to Use the New ‘Index Status’ Feature in Google Webmaster Tools
Google indexing has been a secret for a long time. Surprisingly enough, the cat is finally out of the bag. On July 24, Google announced the release of one of the most awaited features in Google Webmaster Tools – ‘Index Status’. Now, webmasters and SEOs will be able to access data related to Google indexing and crawling of a site. Whether your site contains one hundred web pages or one million, the Index Status feature will keep you abreast of your site’s total number of pages or URLs that Google has indexed.
To check out this new feature in Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these steps –
Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account
Select the site you want to analyze
Click ‘Health’ on the dashboard
Finally, click ‘Index Status’
Check out the figures (latest count) and graph
But this newly added feature doesn’t only show the number of your site’s pages that are currently in Google’s index. It does a lot more. There are many other useful pieces of data that you can access to know more about your site’s health and improve its visibility in Google search results.
You’ll notice two tabs – ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’.
The basic tab displays the total number of a site’s URLs that have been included in Google’s index, i.e. ‘Total Indexed’. Apart from the total count, there’s also a graph that displays data for one year.

The advanced section, on the other hand, provides you with additional data including ‘Ever Crawled’, ‘Not Selected’ and ‘Blocked by robots’. Let’s have a quick look at what each of these actually means.
Ever Crawled – Cumulative total of URLs crawled by Google
Not Selected – URLs not indexed for duplicate content or redirection issues
Blocked by Robots – URLs blocked by the robots.txt file
Accessing all these pieces of data is not a big deal. What’s really important is that you’re aware of how you can use it in order to improve your site’s health and enhance the SEO for better rankings.
Google’s Content Accessibility
If Google has trouble accessing the content on your site, it may lead to different types of search ranking issues. Therefore, you can simply compare the ‘Ever Crawled’ figure with that of the ‘Blocked by Robots’ to find out whether Google has good access to all the content on your site.
Server Related Issues
If the server on which your site is hosted is down frequently, you’ll notice a sudden drop in the total number of indexed pages. This unexpected drop may also mean Google is unable to access the content on your site appropriately. If you notice the total indexed pages graph going up continuously, on the other hand, it means everything is just normal.
Duplicate Content
If you want to keep your site safe from having too many pages that are almost similar (i.e. copied), you should keep a regular watch on the ‘Not Selected’ figure. If this number is very high, you may have duplicated content issues on your site. By detecting duplicate content issues in time, you can take remedial steps before its too late, and avoid search rank penalties.
Uniqueness of Content
The Index Status feature also helps you know about the quantity of unique content contained by your site. The extent of uniqueness can be evident as soon as you compare the number of ‘Total Indexed’ pages with the number of ‘Not Selected’ pages.
Security or Configuration Issues
When everything is fine, you’ll see a steady increase in both the ‘Total Indexed’ and the ‘Ever Crawled’ figure. A low ‘Not Selected’ figure is also an indication of a site’s good health. On the other hand, graph charts showing sudden increases and drops signal serious problems. These issues may be related to your site’s configuration or security.

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