How to check if my website is on Google? [Google search tricks]

Did you just launch a new website or publish a new article? Congrats! To check if it’s on Google, use the following tips on advanced google search tricks.

Is my website on Google? If so, which pages?

To do a quick check on which pages of your website are on Google, go to the Google search bar and type

site:[site name]

If I Google “site:jenniferprufer.com,” it says that I have about 103 webpages from my website indexed by Google (another way of saying that they’re on Google).

If none of the pages on your website are on Google, it’ll say that your search did not match any documents.

How can I check if specific category pages are on Google?

If you want to check if specific directories or folders on your website are on Google, include it in the site search. For example, one of my categories of my articles on my website is “business.” If I want to check to see if the business articles are on Google, I’d type

site:jenniferpruer.com/business

How can I check if pages around a specific topic are on Google?

To find all pages that have a keyword in the URL, type

inurl:[keyword]

If I want to see which pages on my website have the word “productive” in the URL, I can combine this search operator with the site: operator like so

site:jenniferprufer.com inurl:productive

Instead, if I want to see which pages on my website have the word “productive” in the title tag, I can use the intitle search operator:

intitle:[keyword]

*Bonus tip: spy on what your competitors wrote regarding a specific topic by doing a site search for their website

How can I exclude certain categories or keywords from the site search?

Use the – search operator. For example, if I want to see how many pages of my website are on Google minus the blog articles, I’d type

site:jenniferprufer.com -inurl:blog

What can I do if my site is not on Google?

Create an account with Google Search Console (if you search for it, it should be the first result), and then follow the directions to confirm that you’re the site owner. From there, go to sitemaps, and then insert the URL of your sitemap. Google will verify whether it can detect your sitemap correctly.

If you don’t have any sitemap, search for “create sitemap.” There are tons of free tools out there that will create one for you. Just input your website, e.g., https://jenniferprufer.com, and then once it’s created, download it, and then upload it to your root directory (ask your admin or web host to upload it for you if you’re not sure how to upload it to your root directory).

What can I do if a certain page on my website is not on Google?

Go to Google Search Console, click on “URL inspection,” and then copy over the URL that you want to inspect. If it is indeed indexed, and appears in Google Search results, it’ll tell you so. If it’s not, click on “request indexing.”

Word of caution: Know exactly which URL resolves before inserting it into the inspection tool. For example, if I type in https://jenniferprufer.com/seo, it’ll say that that URL is not on Google. That’s because that page resolves on https://jenniferprufer.com/seo/ with a trailing slash. Unless you’re doing an SEO audit or trying to inspect duplicate content on multiple URLs, I recommend copying over the URL from your browser once the page has loaded.

Finally, Bing’s webmaster tools work similarly, so you can replicate the steps above on Bing to check your website’s index status there.

If you liked this article, I think you’ll also like this one here: Website content checklist for bloggers and online publishers