Dawn Shears

Did you know that you can see if search engines are indexing all of the pages on your website (or any other website)? For my own site I’d enter site:dawnshears.com as the search string.  (Just replace the url with any other one…leave out the www)

It will return all of the indexed pages of that site.

If all of your site pages are not being indexed that could be a sign that something is wrong and the ‘bots and spiders are not able to “see” all of your pages. For instance, when I see that only the home page of a site is being indexed, no other pages, it can mean a few things. Perhaps the site is new, sometimes it takes a while for all pages to get indexed. If the site isn’t new it usually means there is a structural problem. Either the site navigation or the site is in Flash or uses frames or another issue. Nine times out of ten it’s issues with Flash or frames. While it’s preferable to build sites (like I do) from the bottom up with search engines in mind, often the site was already in place and it’s not practical to completely redesign it. There are ways to “fix” an existing site to overcome these issues. I’ll address that more in another post.