Oct 02 2007
How to determine Google Indexing
This is going to be a short post for the most part but I thought I would share an interesting discover on how to tell if Google Indexing has picked up your changes yet. While checking on my results over the past few months (I do a lot of manual checking) I noticed something that I hadn’t over the past few years. I don’t know how many people do this (I imagine quite a few) but when checking search engine ranking results I will first do a search on the domain and click the link so that it is easier for me to scan pages indexed by Google and determine if the listing is mine or someone else’s. What I noticed was that every few weeks my links would go back to the original blue color and I hadn’t been clearing my history on my browser.
The realization struck me that the links changing back to blue seemed to coincide with my rankings changing and the cached version of the site updating which could only mean that whenever Google actually refreshed the index was when the history of y clicking would disappear. I know this may seem trivial but it has always been difficult to tell when the Google Index truly has updated since the date in Webmaster Tools is never accurate…and this is a simple way to tell if Google has completed Re-Indexing your site. Now I just do a search for my site and if the URL is still purple I don’t bother checking the rankings because I know they haven’t changed since Google hasn’t completed Indexing my site again.
I was wondering about this and the visited link when using Google; The only downside is that I often delete my browsers cache with building web sites. Do you have any other tips on checking the caching by google. I’ve been using the webmaster tools and watching for when the sitemap was downloaded. Today I posted an audio blog on the subject if getting indexed by Google in 3 days, check it out at: pixelhandler.com.