Before we go over how to check when your page was last indexed by Google, 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. From time to time, you will need to make changes to your site so that it can be better optimized. 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.
In both of these cases, you will want to monitor your rankings before and after the change. This allows you to see how the changes have helped or hurt your visibility and rankings.
One way to monitor that is by checking if (and when) Google has indexed your site. Because indexing is how Google Search organizes information, it’s very important to get Google to index your site regularly. Google says that when they index a site, they add it to the entries for all of the words it contains.’
Google indexing your site is a good way to ensure that your site ranks regularly on Google Search as well.
So how do you check to see the last time your site has been indexed?
The easiest way to check is by using the site: command in the Google search area. Enter site: and then the URL of the page you would like to check. For example, enter ‘site:yourdomain.com’ on Google. If Google has already crawled your site before, then you should see your web pages appear in the search results. This means that Google has already indexed your site at least once before.
When the page appears in the results, you can then click on the ‘Cached’ link below the URL. This will bring you to the last indexed version of the page. On this page, you will notice a date at the top that will show when the page was last indexed. 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, you can check to see how your rankings are impacted when changing content or tags.
If it hasn’t been indexed at all, you’ll see no search results, and Google will simply say, ‘Your search – site:yourdomain.com – did not match any documents.’ In that case, you can wait for Google to index your site naturally or find ways to expedite the process.
Another way to check when your site was last crawled is through Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool. It will provide detailed information pulled directly from Google’s Index.
All you have to do is log into Search Console and enter your URL. Google will then return the last date it was indexed, the status, and any indexing or crawling errors it encountered.
Successfully indexed URLs will also return information about enhancements such as rich results like jobs and recipes.
If a URL has not yet been indexed, the tool will also explain via a report that contains information about noindex robots meta tags and Google’s canonical URL for the page.
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