I wanted to share a way for you to easily monitor how quickly Google indexes articles and posts on your website. You can set up a Google Alert for your website, and as soon as a page is added to Google’s index, you will receive an alert. The alert should be set up like this: “site:YourSiteName.xxx.”
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a considerable amount of lag time between posting an article or dog walker listing on DogWalker.com, and I asked my developer to look into a couple of thing. I also worked in Webmaster Tools to see if I could find an issue. A few tweaks were made, and I wanted to know if they helped, so I set up a Google Alert.
After these two weeks, I know for certain the tweaks helped, as I now notice Google indexing new articles within 12 hours +/- a bit every time I post something. I am not 100% sure whether the indexing had to do with the tweaks or just that the Google Alerts made me more vigilant, but they’re good to have anyway.
If you are concerned about the health of your website or if you want to know if there are issues preventing Google from indexing your articles, you should set up site:YourSiteName.xxx Google Alerts.
A blog style posting should really almost index within 30 minutes or less. I have even seen this almost real time.
I could see a new page to a site taking 12 hours, but it really should index faster than that.
One could also do a Google search using the domain name and matching the title of the page/post
site:domaininvesting.com : how quickly google indexes your website
If you do not have a site map, this can result in slow to no indexing as well.
I posted a thread in a popular forum with the title “how do you start a — ” or something like that. And in 3-5 minutes when I did a search in Google the thread ranked #3 !
Thanks for this useful tool – This is going to help alot. One question I have regards using www. (site name) or simply leaving out the www – does this have an impact on the alerts tool?
i tried my blog with and without the www and only the one without worked. Does this depend on how webmaster tools is set up?