How to check if Google has indexed your content
You put up a blog post or you edit some of the content on your website. You want to find out if Google has indexed the new changes, i.e. Is the new content appearing on Google? How do you do it?
It’s pretty simple.
Say I have made a change to the ‘Services‘ page on this website. I have added a new service to the list, ‘Online Reviews & Reputation Management.’
I have written it all up nicely and I want to check if Google has updated its index of the page.
In the google search bar I would type ‘site:artistdynamix.com Online Reviews’ or or replace ‘Online Reviews’ in the search with any other unique term from the new content I have posted.
This tells Google to look for results only under the site artistdynamix.com.
If I just typed ‘Online Reviews’ into the search bar, Google would spit out results for this term from all over the Internet and if my website doesn’t rank highly for this term, I won’t be able to tell if the new content has been indexed.
Use this method to tell how quickly
Google indexes your content
You can use the method outlined above to check how quickly new content on your website is indexed by Google.
For instance, if you do this search one week after updating your site and your new content still does not appear, your site is not being checked (aka crawled) frequently enough by Google.
You can ‘teach’ search engines how frequently to crawly your site by being very regular in your updates. For instance if you run a blog on your site, and you want the new blog posts to be indexed as soon as possible, instead of randomly posting your blogs whenever you write them, decide on a schedule.
This can be every Monday, at 9am. Then stick to it. When Google crawls your site, it finds new content and is trying to ascertain how frequently you update your site. When it realizes you update once a week it makes sure to crawl your site no less than once every seven days.
For example, we run Valley of Writers and it has new content almost every day. Most of the content we put up is indexed by Google within a few hours.
Fungai Tichawangana
Fungai is a writer, web developer, and creative entrepreneur. He is the founder of Artist Dynamix and is passionate about helping creative entrepreneurs use digital media to realize their full potential.