If you would like to find out if a page or document on your website has been indexed by Google, use the query modifier “site:url” like you would to see how many pages on your site have been indexed (and which ones), but instead of using “site:mcbuzz.com”, for example, use “site:mcbuzz.com/wordpress/what-is-wordpress” or whatever the entire URL or file name is that you want to check.

In other words, say I have a PDF on my site called “mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” (which I don’t - this is just an example). I can do a search using Google for “site:mcbuzz.com/pdf/mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” and Google will tell me whether is has this file in its index or not. Remember to use the entire path or URL for the page or document. If you keep your PDFs in a directory on your site called “pdf”, then you need to include that in the URL as shown in this example. (If you have quesitons about this, send me a comment.)

This post follows along the same lines as an earlier one called “Are PDF Files Indexed by Google?” But I also wanted to talk about this topic for a couple of reasons related to Search Engine Optimization and WordPress.

1. In WordPress, it is possible to specify the URL of a page or post — independent of the title you give the page or post — using the “Page Slug” / “Post Slug” feature. If you don’t specify a slug, WordPress will make one automatically using “Permalinks“. I told WordPress to give this post the URL “mcbuzz.com/2008/document-webpage-indexed-by-google”. If I hadn’t done so, WordPress would have called it “mcbuzz.com/2008/how-to-see-if-a-page-or-document-on-your-website-has-been-indexed-by-google”. Shorter is better as long as the relevant keywords are included in a URL, so I made it shorter by tweaking it a bit and removing words I don’t think are as relevant for SEO as the ones I kept.

2. Google is indexing pages and posts very quickly these days, sometimes in under an hour. The post you are reading right now was indexed in less than 7 minutes. If you have a URL indexed by Google, you may not want to change it because if you change it, the link to the page that’s in Google’s index will be broken. Someone might find your page or post by doing a Google search, but when they click on the listing, they will get a “Page not found” error from your site.

So, if you want to use the Page Slug / Post Slug feature in WordPress to customize your URLs, do so before or shortly after you publish a page or post. If you are thinking of changing a URL, you can check to see if your page has already been indexed before you change it.

If it has been indexed, you need to weigh the possible long-term SEO benefit of changing the URL so that it is more likely to show up on page 1 or 2 of Google for your target keywords — because Google will eventually re-index it. But if it has been indexed already and you want people to find it for some searches right away (in the next week or two, say) then you are probably better off leaving well enough alone.

Here’s an update to this post. News flash: That last paragraph applies only to WordPress.com-hosted websites and blogs. If your site is hosted by a third party rather than WordPress.com, and you are comfortable enough with WordPress to be able to download, install and activate a WordPress plugin (or you know someone who can help you do so), then you don’t need to worry about whether a post or page has already been indexed by Google or not. You can use a WordPress plugin called “Redirection” to redirect someone to the new URL when they request your page or post using the old URL.

In other words, say you create a post called My New Post with the URL http://www.example.com/my-new-post/. It gets indexed by Google in 30 minutes or whatever. Then you realize, Oops!, I should have named that post My New Post About WordPress, because it’s about WordPress! And you really should include “wordpress” in the URL to make the URL more search engine friendly, i.e., to let search engines know that the post really is about WordPress. One of the absolute best ways to do that is to put your keyword — in this case “wordpress” — in the URL. So go ahead, rename your post and either create a new post slug yourself or let WordPress do it for you.

Now your new URL can be http://www.example.com/my-new-post-about-wordpress/ (or whatever you want to make it using the Page Slug /Post Slug feature in the editing window). If someone finds your post using Google, and Google is still using the old URL, that person will click on the link and when their web browser asks your host’s server for the page at http://www.example.com/my-new-post/ , the server will know that they really want the page at the new URL http://www.example.com/my-new-post-about-wordpress/ and it will redirect them there. The fact that you changed the post title and the URL will not keep people from being able to find the page. Pretty cool.

Now for this to work, you have to know how to install the Redirection plugin, and how to set it so that it does what you want. And you also have to be using permalinks. (Read more about WordPress permalinks here.) I just installed the plugin on mcbuzz.com, at it’s one of the easier plugins to use. Just follow the directions in the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin. You can set it to create redirections automatically when a post slug changes, or you can do it yourself manually when a post or page slug changes.

Confused? Just send me a comment using the form below.

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Yes. PDF files are indexed by Google and other search engines.

Following up on a question from a reader (Optimize PDF Files For Websites and Search Engines), as I note there, one way to see if a PDF on your website has been indexed by Google is to copy a long line of text from the PDF, and then put it into the Google search box — with double quotes on either end. You can do this to find any particular document or page available on the Web — as long as it has been indexed (scanned or “spidered” and catalogued) by Google.

For example, if you Google “Enter an estimate of your 2008 nonwage income (such as dividends or interest)” with the double quotes on either end, Google offers you a link to a PDF of IRS Form W-4 for 2008. This shows that the 2008 W-4 PDF document has been indexed. (Incidentally, Google also offers you a link to the mcbuzz.com page you are reading right now since it contains the same string of text.)

Another way to see if a PDF has been indexed by Google is to use the “site:url” query modifier. This is a handy trick when you want to narrow your search to one domain. If I Google [site:mcbuzz.com] - without the brackets, Google lists every page in my site that has been indexed. If I Google [site:mcbuzz.com web] - without the brackets, Google lists every page in my site that contains the word “web”. And, as a helpful reader points out below, you can Google [site:mcbuzz.com filetype:pdf] - without the brackets, to see if there are any PDF files on the mcbuzz.com website that have been indexed by Google. (Be sure not to put a space between “filetype:” and “pdf”.)

I don’t have any PDFs on my site. Try it with another domain to see an actual positive result. To see if a particular PDF on my website has been indexed, I can Google [site:mcbuzz.com “some word or phrase in the PDF”] - without the brackets. Of course, you can also Google [site:mcbuzz.com myfilename.pdf] to do the same.

Returning to the Form W-4 example, Google [site:irs.gov “Enter an estimate of your 2008 nonwage income (such as dividends or interest)”] and Google lists one and only one result: the PDF on the IRS website.

Something fairly amazing: Google knows every phrase in that PDF and in any other document or web page it has indexed. That’s a lot of information.

The other question in the mcbuzz.com post mentioned above was whether a PDF would be indexed if it were encrypted or had other security settings applied to it. If you have Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, you can answer this question yourself.

Open a PDF and then open the Document Properties dialog box (File > Properties…). Click on the Security tab, and you see the various security options. There are different security options depending on which version of Acrobat Reader you want your PDF to be compatible with. The dialog box tells you if search engines will be able to read all or only some parts of the PDF (e.g. metatags or attachments) when you select the various options. If the PDF can’t be read by search engines, it won’t be indexed.

For those interested, here is more information about Google query modifiers like “site:url”.

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Here’s a deceptively simple search engine optimization tip: whenever possible, put the relevant keyword into the URL (web address) of the page you want to optimize.

You may have noticed that on a Google search results page, whenever keywords appear in the URL of a listed page, they are in bold. For example, in a Google search for “mark mclaren”, whenever the words “mark” or “mclaren” are in a URL, they are in bold.

Several Google results for “mark mclaren”. The keyword terms that appear in the page URLs are always shown in bold.

Google looks at a number of things to figure out what a page is about, and the URL is definitely one of them.

I did a little experiment lately to prove the point. My LinkedIn profile has a custom URL — as they all do: you can change your LinkedIn URL from a generic numerical URL to whatever you choose. Mine used to be http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcbuzz and it was nowhere near page one of Google results for “mark mclaren”.

Then I changed it to what it is now: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcbuzzmarkmclaren and a few weeks later, there it was on page one. To the best of my knowledge, all other factors remained unchanged, so this stands as pretty good evidence of the power of putting keywords into a URL when you want to improve a page’s rank in search results.

If you try this technique with your own LinkedIn URL, be sure to put the new link somewhere where search engines will find it. One good place is in the sidebar of your blog or website using one of the “View My Profile” buttons LinkedIn provides. See an example of a LinkedIn profile button on the McBuzz About This Site page. If you already have one of these, you need to update the URL to match your newly customized one.

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Here are examples of “natural” or “organic” search results vs. “paid” search results on Google:

The orange boxes indicate paid search results. Google marks these as Sponsored Links. Sponsored Links always appear at the top or on the right side of search results pages. Businesses pay Google to be listed here. These are also called text advertisements, “paid placement” ads or “pay per click” ads.

The green box indicates a natural (also called “organic”) search results listing. As of today, October 23, 2007,  McBuzz is at the top of local search results for “seattle marketing communications”. McBuzz does not pay Google to appear in this spot.

It’s worth noting that since this post was created, Google has done away with local search listings for “seattle marketing communications”, and McBuzz is no longer featured in this top position. Try “wordpress websites seattle” instead.

Yahoo! and MSN.com search results pages have a similar format — with both paid and natural search listings.

Google Indexes Pages Much More Frequently Than Before
Here’s an interesting sidebar. I created the post you are reading right now at 10:16 AM today, October 23. Looking at the Google search results page just now (at 10:30 PM the same day), I see that this post has already been indexed by Google, meaning that it shows up on page one (in the number 10 spot at the bottom of the page) for the same keyword.

Why is this important? Because it shows just how quickly new content on your website can affect its performance in search results.

The post you are reading right now was indexed by Google and listed on page one of serch results for “seattle marketing communications” the same day it was created! What does this tell us? When you apply basic search engine optimization techniques — including making frequent updates to your site with keyword-rich headlines, bullet points and text — you can see immediate results and bring in more customers.

You may recall the days when you had to wait three to four weeks, sometimes longer, for updates to your website to show up in search engine results pages. If you optimized your site, it might take at least that long to find out if what you did worked or not.

As this example shows, those days are long gone — provided you are doing the right things with your website. And that’s a significant qualification. What are the right things? Exactly what we talk about on mcbuzz.com, like following our Web Marketing Tips — and the fact that you should use content managment or “blogging” software like WordPress to build and maintain your site rather than old-fashioned, “static” format HTML. (The latter includes sites created with do-it-yourself, “site builder” tools you find on GoDaddy.com, Network Solutions and Yahoo! web hosting.)

Let me know what you think!

McBuzz Web Marketing Tips
#1: Use “site:url” to Find Out If Your Website Is Indexed by Google

#2: Use XML Sitemap Generator to Get All Your Website’s Pages Indexed by Google

#3: Submit an XML Sitemap to Google

#4: Use Keywords in Web Page Titles

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Page titles are a critical and often overlooked part of web marketing and search engine optimization. If you have ever tried to find a business on the Web by typing the name of the business into Google or another search engine only to be confronted by dozens of pages that refer to that business — with none of them actually providing a link to the business’s website — then you are familiar with missing or weak page titles.

Many web pages have default values like “Untitled Document” or “New Page 1″ as their title. The title displays along the top of your web browser. Few people even notice it. But search engines definitely notice page titles. The title is one of the first places a search engine like Google looks to determine what a web page is about.

The page title is one of the first things search engines look at to determine what a web page is about. Many web designers forget or don’t know about the importance of page titles, hence the prevelance of (totally useless) default page titles like “Untitled Document” and “New Page 1″.

If a business’s website does not show up on the first page of results when you type the business name (and the city the business is in if it’s a common name) into a search engine, the business name is probably not in the title of the website’s home page.

If you don’t know how to change your website’s page titles, see Web Marketing Tip #5 (coming soon) or comment on this post and I will get to it right away!

If you are using a website building tool on a service like Register.com or Yahoo! Geocities that makes it difficult to change page titles, then it’s time to get a new hosting setup! Your new customers will thank you.

Web Marketing Tip #4 is “Use Keywords in Web Page Titles” because the name of your business is obviously not the only thing people search for when looking for businesses like yours. If yours is a local brick and mortar business, put your address in the page title of your home page, or at least the city, state and Zip code. If you are the business owner and you want people to find your business’s website when they search for your name — put that in the title as well.

For example, note that “Mark McLaren” is in the title of my McBuzz Communications website home page and my McBuzz Communications blogspot blog. If you Google “mark mclaren”, you will find both sites on page one. (Search results vary from week to week. Right now I’m on page one.)

Don’t use the same title for every page in your site. Tailor page titles to the content of each page. One of the great features of WordPress is that it creates page titles for you automatically. Put keywords in the titles of your posts and they appear in your page titles as well.

If you have a local business in a particular neighborhood, use that neighborhood name in your page titles. In many cases, this will do wonders for your position in search results.

Of course, you want to use keywords in lots of other places besides page titles, but — first things first — page titles are a great place to start.

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