Joe Majewski

How to Find Pages that Google has Indexed

If you’re a webmaster that is curious to know which of your site’s page have been indexed by Google, simply use the site operator and perform a search query such as:

site:www.joemajewski.com

The results you see upon executing that Google search will be a list of pages that Google has indexed on your site. Although that may not be a complete list of all the pages that Google “knows” about, it is a list of all pages that Google finds relevant enough to list in their results.

Many people believe that the more pages that Google has indexed, the better, but that is not the case at all. It is much more beneficial to you to have 50 pages indexed that are all rich with content than to have 100 pages indexed with low quality content. This is why it is important to update your robots.txt file to ensure that certain pages get ignored by Google’s search engine.

For example, I prevent Google from indexing pages located within the Traffic Stats tab that’s located in the tab list at the top of my blog. The reason being is that Google will find dozens, or maybe even hundreds of pages within that section of the site that are filled with daily statistics, weekly statistics, etcetera, and in general, you only want page’s with relevant content to be listed on Google.

That’s my tip of the day, but don’t expect to find these on a daily basis.

Google’s Slow Indexing Rate for Blog Posts Resolved… Kinda

Last night I posted an article about Google’s slow indexing rate for my latest blog posts. Usually my articles get indexed within minutes, but recently it has been taking over 12 hours before Google gets around to adding my posts to their search results.

I did some research and found that others have had that same problem in the past. I still don’t know the exact reason that this was occurring, but rest assured, Google did get around to indexing my articles, albeit it took almost a full day.

For anyone else having similar issues, I would suggest just waiting it out, as maybe Google’s pinging service was queued up heavily during the time of my submission, or possibly they were in the process of updating their search engine. Regardless, I can only assume that things will return back to normal in due time.

If this problem persists, I will escalate my concerns and shoot an email in Google’s direction to find out why. I understand that Google’s crawl rate is composed of many variables, but that should have no affect on their pinging service, which tells Google that new content has been published and alerts them to index the new page.

This situation is out of my hands, as there really isn’t anything that I can do to cause my pages to index quicker, except to legitimately write new content on a regular basis, as always.

Google has always revolved around the thesis that content is most important regarding getting a high ranking in the search results, so the best thing to do when a problem like this arises is to, you guessed it, write new content rich with information useful to others.

Google Slow to Index Blog Posts

By using Google’s site operator, you can quickly see a list of pages that Google has indexed on any given website, or even directories or subdomains within a website. For example, performing a Google search for site:www.JoeMajewski.com, you will retrieve a full list of all pages that Google has found on my (this) website.

Usually, my new blog posts are indexed within minutes of being posted. Worst case scenario it would take thirty minutes, but never longer than that. The reason this happens is because WordPress pings a service that lets Googlebot know that new content has arrived upon publishing a new article.

Lately, this has changed. It has been 4 days since I posted an article about Google performing their PageRank update, and that submission has yet to be indexed on Google. This may be ironically due to the PageRank update causing it to be lost during the process, but I cannot think of any other reason as to why it still wouldn’t be indexed.

I have also written an article about an hour ago (that is unrelated to most other entries that I write) that is also not yet indexed by Google. I am assuming that the PageRank update is complete, and that things are back to normal (no more Google Dance, as the SEO geeks call it), so that tosses that theory out the window. But perhaps it is not indexed because of the fact that it’s unrelated to most of my other content.

I would be disappointed if Google changed the way that they archive blog posts, as I always enjoyed seeing my latest submissions show up on the search engine minutes after being published. If anyone has an explanation for as to why it is taking so long to get my articles archived, please comment and let me know.

Another reason this baffles me is because I just received PageRank 2, meaning that I should have more priority than I did before, so if anything was to change, I would expect it to be for the better. I will continue to investigate this issue, as I find it important for my content to be archived as soon as possible for best performance.

As always, I’ll keep you updated if I figure anything out. There must be some reason for the slow indexing that I’m receiving, and I’m curious to know if this is happening to others as well. Over and out.

Google’s PageRank Update

Google is in the process of performing PageRank updates today. I recently opened up my web browser and was surprised to find that my PageRank went from a pitiful PR0 to a respectful PR2. This update has really boosted my morale, as I worked very hard for that PR.

I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing and maybe I can earn a PR3 by the time they release their next update. I have written many articles about Google PageRank which will surely be in the list of related posts found below this article, so if you are interested in learning about how to increase your Google PageRank, or to simply learn more about how it’s calculated, check out some of my other blog posts.

That’s all the news for today!

Aiming For PageRank 1 :: My Insight Into Google’s Algorithm

It wasn’t long before many of the pages on this site began being assigned PageRank 0 (PR0), which baffled me at first. I had always been under the impression that PageRank was something that took many months to update. It seems that perhaps PageRank 0 is the exception, or maybe Google assigns PageRank values based off of the PageRank of the rest of the site.

This simple hypothesis would explain why certain YouTube videos achieve PR3 or PR4 weeks after being released, as they are quickly crawled and assigned a temporary PageRank during the period of time between legitimate updates to preserve Google’s accurate results.

Google’s results are constantly changing due to what they refer to as “rolling updates”, made to keep everything up to date. If it took three months for all new pages on the Internet to become valuable to the search engine then there would be millions of outdated pages that “deserved” to be atop the lists but didn’t make the PR update “cut”.

I wouldn’t want to give myself a bad name, so I am going to stand out and admit that this is all just my simple explanation based off of observations that I’ve made. This would also explain why some websites dramatically rise or fall in PageRank seemingly overnight, as the “legitimate” update rolls through and determines a more suitable PageRank for that specific website.

Who knows? Maybe Google truly believes that this website has already earned a PageRank 2, but because of the fact that the official update has not yet been run through, all I can do is wait and find out. For the time being, all of my pages will either be labeled as PR0 or PR N/A.

There is a lot of mystery behind the infamous PageRank algorithm, and I am slowly beginning to understand more and more about it. It will be a happy day once I log onto the Internet to find that this site has got some green on that bar (you know what I’m talking about).

And oh, how I despise the waiting game.