What’s Google indexing for your site?

A quick and easy way to get a sense of what Google has indexed for a website is to use what’s called a search operator. More specifically, the site: search operator.

How To Do It

Go to Google, and perform a search using a phrase like this (substituting your actual website name instead of yourwebsitename):

site:www.yourwebsitename.com

Things To Try

• Try doing this with and without the www. at the start.
• Try doing this with http:// at the start.
• Try doing this with https:// at the start.
• If you have something different at the start of your site address – like blog.yourwebsitename.com or info.yourwebsitename.com (or something else), try it with that, too.

What You’ll See

Once you run the search, you’ll (hopefully) see lots of entries for pages on your website.

Even more hopeful is that they’re the ones that you want Google to be showing. (If not, work up a list and start exploring them one at a time. Why is it there? Do you need to tell Google not to list it anymore?)

Keep In Mind

The reason (up above) I said you’ll “get a sense” of it is that Google doesn’t guarantee that what you’re going to see is a 100% complete picture. If a URL is indexed, it can show up in the results when you use the site: search operator.

But it’ll get you close, and I bet you’ll learn something about your site in the process.

To Learn More

Google Search Central Documentation