This is big news. Google Webmaster Tools has launched a new feature – Index Status which will present webmasters with a chart showing the number of indexed pages for a site during the past year. The new feature is available under the Health menu in Webmaster Tools. This is how the indexing graph looks like with number of pages currently indexed and other data:

Google Webmaster Tools' 'Index Status' Will Now Reveal All Index Secrets!

There is also an ‘Advanced’ tab added to the new feature. This allows you to dig into the data deeper. The advanced section shows totals of indexed pages, number of pages crawled, and the pages blocked by robots.txt (and hence remain uncrawled), and the number of pages Google did not include.

Google Webmaster Tools' 'Index Status' Will Now Reveal All Index Secrets!

Google further said, “If some of your content doesn’t appear any more on Google and you notice that the graph of pages indexed has a sudden drop, that may be an indication that you introduced a site-wide error when using meta=”noindex” and now Google isn’t including your content in search results. If you change the URL structure of your site and don’t follow our recommendations for moving your site, you may see a jump in the count of “Not selected”. Fixing the redirects or rel=”canonical” tags should help get better indexing coverage.”

What do you think of this new feature? Will you have all your indexing questions answered now? Do share your views.

Author

Navneet Kaushal is the Editor-in-Chief of PageTraffic Buzz. A leading search strategist, Navneet helps clients maintain an edge in search engines and the online media. Navneet is also the CEO of SEO Services company PageTraffic which is one of the leading search marketing company in Asia.