Google Webmasters Update: Index Status (oh and another Panda update)
You should find a lovely new graph in Google Webmaster Tools today, under health, it’s called “Index Status”, check it out:
As you can see from this website, it’s in a reasonable good condition.
Now for exhibit B:
On this one we can see the website has been performing quite well but there are some teething problems that have started to grow – this is one of my clients so I best nip this in the bud before it gets to be a big issue.
Finally, our worst culprit:
As you can see, this website has big issues, or does it? For example, in the announcement of Index Status entitled Behold Google index secrets, revealed! they talk about how urls blocked in robots.txt are not included, but what if you are using the robots meta tag to noindex stuff? I know that this particular website noindexes a lot of pages, so I think further clarification is needed on Google here, either that or they need to improve the functionality. A help article would really be handy here, as you can see people are already coming up with issues over on the Google Webmaster Tools Help Forum.
So, useful stuff, I know I’m pleased and I’ve already been checking all my clients to see if there any gains to be made.
Panda
Also announced yesterday was the latest Panda update, nobody at Bronco has seen any change as of yet, but we’re expecting to see something over the next few days as it appears to take a few days to take effect (judging from past roll outs over in the UK).
6 Comments
Roy - http://www.chapter42.com
I’m working on some samples that look a lot worse I can tell you 😀
Adarsh Thampy - http://conversionchamp.com/
David,
I was also confused by this update. One of the site I work with has this result: http://i.imgur.com/XUtHZ.jpg
We have implemented rel=next and prev, no indexed tons of pages and yet we see issues. I suppose Google does not take into consideration the meta no-index applied.
Chris Gedge - http://www.further.co.uk
Do you have any evidence that they roll out the UK update after the US one? Thanks
Sanat Singha - http://www.websigmas.com
How to avoid this problem once discovered? While checking Google analytics report of one of my client, I found this update.
I tried resubmitting XML site maps and reindexing a few important pages manually. However, there is no outcome for last 2 days.
can someone help me sort it out?
Tony King - http://www.semetrical.com
It’s always nice to see Google releasing more data for analysis, and a full year of data is a positive too, very generous for once – this is certainly a step in the right direction.
That said, the value of these numbers is dubious – as you correctly point out, many of the ‘Not selected’ URLs could have been purposely excluded via Canonical tags or potentially Meta Robots tags (clarification on what is/is not included in each dataset would indeed be welcome, I feel a test coming on).
The real value is understanding what actual pages and content is/isn’t indexed and this total view doesn’t deliver, it’s a nice addition though. I’ll stick with using DeepCrawl for my more detailed website indexation analysis and will let you know if I identify inclusion/exclusion filters for this new GWT feature.
andrei - http://www.ibuspro.com/
Huh! This sounds pretty much confusing and interesting. Hopefully things will clear up in the following days or so. I’m not really clear on what’s going on, but thanks for helping me put the pieces together. This Google update is making my head spin.