How To Find Out Which Pages Search Engines Have Indexed On Your Website

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Oct 25, 2007

A client asked, "How can I tell how many of my web pages are in Google search results?" Let me show you how.

All three of the major search engines, Google, MSN (aka, Live) and Yahoo provide a special search command to tell you approximately how many pages each has indexed from your website. The special command is the same on each search engine, and is called site:.

For example, on Google you can type site:inetsolution.com. The search engine results page (SERP) will display only pages that exist on some inetsolution.com domain, such as www.inetsolution.com or turnleft.inetsolution.com. The results, shown below, tell you that Google has indexed approximately 997 pages on all of the various inetsolution.com websites:

If you wanted to limit the search to just pages on www.inetsolution.com, the command is simply site:www.inetsolution.com.

The command yields the following results on Live.com

site:www.inetsolution.com search results on Live.com

On Yahoo, issuing the site: command will redirect your search results to Yahoo Site Explorer, but will give you the information you're seeking:

site:www.inetsolution.com search results on Yahoo.com

So why are the results different on each search engine? Well, the answer is in the question -- because each search engine is different. The fact that each search engine indexes and ranks content differently is why it is so important to plan and test your search engine optimization and marketing strategies with each major search engine in mind.

Remember also that the page counts that the search engines show are approximate and may include pages that are no longer active on your website, or in some instances, are duplicated within the search engine's index.