Before we go over how to check when your page was last indexed, let’s first discuss why it is important to know this information. As a website owner of an ecommerce site, there’s a good chance that you are currently targeting keywords for your SEO strategy and from time to time you will need to make changes to your site to be better optimized for the words or add additional terms to your strategy. When you make these changes, it is important to see how it impacts your rankings and other SEO performance metrics.

For example, let’s say that you decide a keyword you’ve optimized a page for isn’t converting well for you so you’d like to switch it out with another term that you think can bring in better targeted traffic. Or let’s say that you’ve discovered that another site has duplicated some of your content, so you’ve decided to rewrite your content to avoid any duplicate content penalties from the search engines. Well in both of these cases, you will want to monitor your rankings before and after the change, to see how the changes have helped or hurt your visibility and rankings.

So how do you check to see the last time your site has been indexed? Well, the easiest way I prefer is to use the site: command in the Google search area. If you enter site: and then the URL of the page you would like to check, you should see the page appear in the search results if Google has already indexed it at least once before. When the page appears in the results, you can then click on the “Cached” link below the URL, which will bring you to the last indexed version of the page.

When you arrive at this page, you will notice a date at the top that will show when the page was last indexed and you can also see all of the content that was on that page as of the last index.

By checking the date and content on the Cached version, you will be able to tell if your changes have already been updated in Google’s index, or if they still haven’t been crawled. If they haven’t yet been crawled, continue to check back every few days to see when your page is finally updated in the index. When it does finally get indexed, you can then compare its performance to the old version of the page…for example, checking to see how your rankings are impacted when changing the title tag or content of a page.