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Figuring Out Which Indexed Pages Are Doing Work

ryan-frank | Feb 22, 2010 |

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You can see how many pages of your site Google has indexed by running an analytic search. However, if you type in "search: yoursite.com" into Google, you're likely to get one number the first time and a completely different number when you input the same search just a few minutes later. Such a continuously shifting number is not a very reliable key performance indicator (KPI), but you'd be surprised at how many companies track this number to determine their KPI. However, the indexation of your site on Google is not as important as figuring out what number of indexed pages are actually showing up on search results and generating hits. You can do this easily through Google analytics.

Taking a Look at Google Analytics
To get started, you'll want to open up your Google analytics page and find the "traffic sources" button. Click on it and then go to the "search engines" subsection. From here, click on the search engine that you want to see indexation results from and then select to view the organic traffic results only.

Using the landing page filter in the dropdown menu, you can see the number of hits that are being generated by each one of your website's individual pages. You'll also be able to see the total number of pages that are generating at least one hit from search engines, which will give you a better tool for measuring your site's KPI than merely the total number of pages indexed.

A More Relevant KPI
By recording the number of pages that are getting at least one hit on Google every month you'll come up with a more accurate KPI that you can actually put to use, more so than if you just look at the number of pages that Google says to have indexed.

The page indexation has no real importance unless it reflects how many of your site's web pages are showing up on results listings and attracting hits. The sites that are indexed, but not getting hits, are sites that need to be worked on. Perhaps they have insufficient backlinks or too much duplicate content, which can be prevented with proper content writing for SEO.