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.

It’s not just the subject knowledge by which you identify an SEO professional or a service provider. An SEO professional is also recognized by the kind of SEO tools they have in their toolkit. Since search engine optimization is a complicated field of internet marketing, you’ll always need to use a set of tools to deal with tasks including keyword research, keyword density checking, backlinks analysis, search rank checking and search comparison among others.
Thankfully, there are several SEO tools that you can use for free.
Website owners who have limited budget or can’t afford to use paid SEO tools will find the free tools really useful. No, you should never underestimate the word ‘free’, as even today there are many wonderful things that you can do in this world without spending a penny. But we are not going to talk about all those free things here.
What we’ll discuss here are the useful SEO tools that are available to you for free. Given below are eleven of them.
#1. Open Site Explorer
Developed by SEOmoz.org, Open Site Explorer is an excellent SEO tool to use for improving your site’s linking profile. With this tool, you can have a closer look at the distribution of anchor text on your site’s pages. The tool also allows you to compare external linking with internal linking on your site compare up to five different sites with one another. A highly useful SEO software indeed!
#2. Majestic SEO
Though this SEO tool has different paid plans, its free version comes along with many features that you’ll love. If you are interested in gathering data for only those sites that are your own, you can use the tool for no cost at all. Whether you want detailed SEO reports every month or plan to analyze the backlinks profile of your website, Majestic SEO is one of the best options to go for. To know more about what this service provides you with free, you can check out this blog post on their site.
#3. SEOquake
This is one of those free SEO tools that you’ll need to install. The analytic SEO tool is currently available for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers. Whether you want to gather essential data on Google SERPs, Alexa ranking, page rank or keyword density, SEOquake does all this quite well. Within a matter of seconds, you can get this tool installed and start using it to your search optimization benefits.
#4. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Some of the best SEO tools that you can use for free come to you straight from Google itself. One of the most used of these is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. With this search optimization tool, you can discover keyword and group ideas that you might not be able to think of on your own.
#5. Site Link Analyzer
Brought to you by SEO Chat, this SEO tool comes in very handy when you want to analyze a webpage in terms of external linking, internal linking and their associated linking or anchor text.
#6. SEO Site Checkup
This is yet another really useful tool that you can use to improve the SEO of your website or blog. With this tool, you can gather a wide variety of essential data about your site or web pages. SEO Site Checkup helps you with checking your site for factors including backlinks, H1 tag, H2 tag, HMTL page size, Meta tags, site loading speed, URL canonicalization and page object count among others.
#7. Rank Checker
Thousands of webmasters around the world use this tool (developed by SEOBook) to analyze the ranking status of their websites. Rank Checker is available for Firefox browser. So, you’ll need Firefox to download this SEO software application. The free tool provides you with an in-depth insight that’s essential for staying ahead of your competition as far as SEO is concerned.
#8. Google Analytics
Again, this is one of the best tools that you can use. Developed by Google itself, Google Analytics software offers you a deep insight into content performance, social media engagement, visitor behaviors, advertising performance, sales and conversions among others. If you have not installed this tool on your site yet, you missing out on a huge opportunity of gathering critical SEO data.
#9. Google Webmaster Tools
Whether you want to know about the keyword traffic, ranking keywords, crawl errors, indexing status, internal linking or external linking, Google Webmaster Tools by Google is one of the most recommended tools to use. By using this tool appropriately, you can keep an eye on the health of your website and enhance its SEO.
#10. Keyword Niche Finder
If you want to find out some of the most profitable keyword groups associated with your topic, Keyword Niche Finder by WordStream does an excellent job. Many claim this keyword research tool to be better than the Google Keyword Tool. Now, that’s something you need to find out on your own.
#11. Alexa
Yes, Alexa is also among the best SEO tools available at no cost. The service has a number of useful features to boast of. Some of these include traffic rank, page views per visit, bounce rate, downstream traffic sources, upstream traffic sources, search traffic percentage, top search queries, demographics etc.