Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines index your website, so it will pull up in search results when content on your site corresponds to a users search query. For this reason, you want as many of your web pages as possible to be indexed on the search engines. If only your website’s homepage is indexed, a search query corresponding to content on your sub pages will not appear in the results.
It’s really simple to check how many of your site’s pages are stored in Google, Yahoo or Bing.
- Go to Google and type the following in the search bar: site:yourdomain.com Try both with and without “www.”, and be careful to not include a space between “site:” and your domain name.
- Right under the search bar you will see “About X results” This is the number of pages from your sites that are indexed on Google.
- Go to Yahoo and Bing and repeat the same process.
Together, these three search engines represent more than 95% of the searches conducted in North America and should give you a good idea of how many pages you have indexed.
The point of this exercise is to make sure that your website is being fully used. If you notice that you have more pages than what you see returned in the search engines, look for your important pages, web pages you want your potential customers to find. For testing these important pages, just enter the entire URL into the search box and it will be the first result returned if it is indexed.
If some important pages are not indexed and your website is still new it’s probably just a matter of time before they begin to index. If your website is well established (over a year for a 300 + pages website, less for a smaller one), here’s a few things you can do:
- Make sure they do not have the “noindex” tag which will prevent Google from indexing them.
- Update your websites content with relevant copy, as seen here.
- Make sure internal links from your website are pointing to theses pages.
