This is great news since they have finally revealed the index status that showcase the chart flow of the number of indexed pages for a site for these past years. By logging into our account and clicking the Health menu, the indexation information will be all revealed. Click on the Index Status and the graphs that showcase the total indexed number of pages will be out in the open.

Thoroughly, the new tool features the number of pages it has included in the index. They have included the Advanced tool to dig deeper on some issues which includes; the number of pages it has crawled, the number of pages it did not include in the index and the number of pages that have been blocked by robots.txt.

The number of pages it has crawled will show the cumulative total of URL’s on a certain site that Google has crawled. Not all crawled URLs will be indexed and from time to time, Google may discover inbound links from other sites. As new pages will be added to your site, the number of pages crawled should also increase over time. Those number pages that are opted not to be included in the index are actually the pages that Google crawled but it showed similarity to other sites or it had been directed to another URL. Another advanced tool is the number of pages that are blocked. Those are the pages that Google could not crawl because they are not allowed in your robot.txt file.

The Google Webmaster Central further discussed it in their blog and said that:

“All this data can be used to identify and debug a variety of indexing-related problems. For example, 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.

Another example: 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.”

The fact that Google showed transparency in their Index Selection Process means a lot and good news for almost everybody in the SEO business. This will definitely lead to new strategies and techniques. Gone are the days that we tend to question if your pages are in the index sites. The main focus will be on how to crawl up those pages and be on the coveted spot of the top list page rank.