Knowing where you rank in search engines is hugely important, especially if you have a newer site. Newer sites are never able to get a fair share of traffic since their youth generally places them in unfavorable locations in the search engine listings.If you know exactly what to do, you can overcome! You can achieve higher rankings which will feed a supply of traffic to your site that will never end.

Things You Will Learn In This Article

• How to find the number of pages you have in the Google and Yahoo indexes.
• How to find out how many links Google and Yahoo are giving you credit for.
• How to find your Technorati ranking.
• What all of these stats mean.

The first step in this process is knowing exactly where you stand. If you don’t know where your site is starting, I find it difficult to believe that you can get to where you need to be. In order to grow, you must make a conscious effort; in other words you have to know where your site is currently sitting.

Here are some methods you should use to find out where you stand.

Indexed Pages In Google and Yahoo

Google has a program called GoogleBot that follows links around the internet all day long. GoogleBot runs 24/7 and is always searching for new web sites as well as new pages in existing sites. Google stores all of these sites and pages in an index. Their search engine rankings are based on the information stored in that index, and a ranking system that decides which pages are the most important.

What most people miss completely is that you can hugely increase your traffic by increasing the amount of pages of your site that Google has in the index. If there is only one thing you learn from this lesson, learn this: If you want to be a dot com mogul, you need to stuff that index with more pages pronto.

The Yahoo search engine runs on a very similar technology, and getting more pages into The Google index will get you more pages in the Yahoo one.

How Do I Find Out How Many Pages I Have In The Google Index?

1. Go to Google.com.
2. Type site:yoururl.com into the search bar, substituting your domain for yoururl.com: . For my site, I will type site:courtneytuttle.com. (Note: you need to use the version of the domain you’re site is using. I have configured my site to not use the ‘www’ at all. If you do, you’ll need to use site:www.yoururl.com. If you need to find out which version you use you should go to your site and click on the link to the homepage. Look up in the address bar of your browser to see if it has the ‘www’ up there or not.)
3. Hit Search.

Toward the right hand side of the screen, you will see how many results Google returned. It will say, “Results 1-10 of about 51 from courtneytuttle.com.” It will of course have your domain name, and where you see the number 51 here you will see the number for your site.

Hint: If it says that you only have 1, you need to find a link that says, “repeat the search with the omitted results included.” If you click it, it will show you the true number of your pages that are in the Google index.

How Do I Find Out For The Yahoo Index?

You do the exact same thing, except you do it at Yahoo.com. Yahoo is showing 45 of my pages, which shows us that Google is indexing pages more quickly than Yahoo.

What Does This All Mean?

It means that these search engines only have about 50 of my pages to look through when they create their rankings. Compare this to 2,620 for JohnChow.com, and 3,690 for Problogger.net. It should be easy to see that these sites will get a lot more search engine traffic than I do. I guess I will be working on correcting that.

How Do I Get More Pages Into These Indexes

You create more pages by writing more entries in your blog, or creating more pages in your site.

How Do I Find Out How Many Sites Are Linking To Me, According To Google?

1. Go to Google.com.
2. Type: link:yoururl.com. (Note: if you use www you should type: link:www.yoururl.com.)
3. Hit search.

Google will then show you the pages that are linking to you. On the right hand side of the screen they will show you how many results there are. Right now Google is giving this site credit for 3 links.

How Do I Find Out How Many Sites Are Linking To Me, According To Yahoo?

You do the exact same thing, except you do it at Yahoo.com. Yahoo calls them inlinks, and the results page will show you how many they’re giving you credit for. Right now Google is giving me credit for 321 links.

Why Are The Google And Yahoo Numbers So Different?

Yahoo updates their list in real time, and Google updates theirs once every few months. In other words, links that I got yesterday will show in Yahoo, but won’t show in Google for a few months.

Google also scrutinizes the links, so they don’t count some of them. Your Google number will always be lower than your Yahoo number for this reason.

Why Do The Link Numbers Matter?

Because the amount of links your site has directly influences your search engine ranking. Do you remember when I said before that Google and Yahoo have systems where they decide which pages are the most important? The number of pages that are linking to your site is the biggest factor that they use.

If I have 3 pages linking to my site, and JohnChow.com has 2,680, he will obviously rank higher than I will. Since this site is only 2 months old, I have a lot of work to do in this area! I would expect my Google number to me much higher in the next update.

How Do I Get More Links?

Start here: 102 Ways To Make Your Site A Back-Link Superstar

How Do I Find My Technorati Ranking?

1. Go To Technorati.com.
   
2. In the drop down box next to the search bar, select ‘in blog directory’.
3. Type your url into the search bar. For my site I will type courtneytuttle.com into the search bar. If you use www, then you will need to add it in.
4. Hit Search

Technorati will bring up your site, and will show you what your ranking is. My current ranking is 140,961. It also shows that I have 73 links from 32 blogs. This number is different from the Google and Yahoo numbers because it only shows links from blogs, and does not show links from other types of sites.

Why Is My Technorati Ranking Significant?

You Technorati ranking is used my many companies to figure out how much they will pay you for advertising rights on your site. If you want to increase your ad revenue, you will need to better your Technorati ranking.

How Do I Better My Technorati Ranking?

Technorati uses their link number to calculate this. In order to better your ranking, you have to get more blogs to link to you. For methods of making this happen you should read my article on the subject: 102 Ways To Make Your Site A Back-Link Superstar.

Conclusion

Check these stats often. Better them.