Recently, I noticed a lot of websites have high indexed pages found in Google search results while operating site:www.website.com in search box. I have tried this in several country specific Google and gets similar results for all top markets in each country. This must be a coincidence as it happens somewhere during the introduction of “Index Status” option in Google Webmaster tools. We have noticed huge spike in index pages for last 4 weeks before the tool introduction.
We have backtrack any changes made on website and made backup upload and still the problem never solved for weeks. My best guess is that Google was trying to get data for “Index Status” tools or could have been reset a few columns in this page in last 4 weeks. That is why we are noticing huge index pages shown search results. Recent hangouts with Google Webmaster guy John Mueller in Google+ have answered several questions related to this tool. One of my favorite is to show URLs of non-qualified to be shown in this tool page. It would really helpful if we can find out which URLs are not getting indexed and which have been indexed.
Currently, there are no possible ways to get full list of URLs listed in Google index (using site:www.website.com only displays first 1,000 search results). I wish Google Webmaster tools team can work to display all our website URLs that have been crawled, ever crawled, indexed, non-indexed, blocked by robots.txt in “Index Status”. This will be very helpful to pinpoint any problem and fixing will be much easier if we know where to fix the errors. Hopefully, Google will introduce more details to this function as soon as possible. I know it is too much to ask for free tools but hey, it’s going to make Google search results much cleaner with webmasters all around the world that gives serious attention to Google WMT errors.
I wish to join this kind of gathering next time. Probably, need to get ready with some question list before even thinking about it. Have you find this interesting? Do you have any unanswered questions that needs quick answer? Or, would you like to get some exploding secret or news about SEO? Don’t hesitate to talk this Google guy and he may give one or two secrets slipped away. So far, I don’t see any yet but hoping to get some soon. Looks like it’s not only Matt Cutts that releases news about SEO here… John Müller will be the next target who is gaining popularity slowly. Probably, the exposure might reach bigger scale if they frequently posted on Twitter. A good start for newbies and also those who are experts in SEO field to learn any new stuffs about Google WMT and SEO in brief here.
For those who have not missed the party.. please check out below URLs:
Almost 1 hour video at https://plus.google.com/113006028898915385825/posts/9TFs7KdCA7p
Written by Atniz
Topics: Google WMT