Improve your Index Penetration

Most webmasters wouldn’t even consider building a Blog with “one page”, right? The more pages, articles and permalinks you have, the more search terms you can target and the more opportunities you have to appear in search results. In this case, more is better, right? That much is obvious to us all, however what isn’t immediately obvious is that the search engines all have their own idea of how many pages are on your site. This concept is known as “index penetration”. It basically means how many and which pages are actually getting indexed by the search engines.

To a search engine, a page that isn’t in their results is a page that does not exist. So, if you’re pointing links at pages that aren’t getting indexed, the PageRank is passing out through those links into the ether. Therefore, it is important in the long run to know which pages are getting indexed and which aren’t. Then you should take steps to improve your index penetration. In the long run, you’d like to have your entire site indexed. The first step is checking to see if you’re getting indexed at all.

To Improve your index pentration you can do the following exercise. Take one of the pages from your site that’s not indexed at all, and link to it from a couple pages that are in the index. Wait a couple weeks, and check back to see if your page has moved into the search results and if your page is now “cached”. Then you can repeat the process to bring more pages into the search results.

To know if a specific page is indexed, you will need the google toolbar installed. After installing the google toolbar, visit the page you want to check if is indexed, for example “yourdomain.com/my-articles/search-engines/” and on the toolbar click on “cached snapshot of page”. If this is your first time through with the fast start process, don’t get hung up on indexing just yet. You’ll have plenty of chances to revisit this article, after you’ve done some work to develop and optimize your content, build links and tweak your design.