What is a site query?

A site query is the process of checking a link or domain for indexing. Each subpage of the entered domain is listed and can be filtered according to certain criteria.

How does a site query work?

You can check a URL or a domain for indexing by the Google algorithm. This is done through the normal Google search box.

Just enter “site:URL”.

For the query of a domain: “site:domain.de”.

Here is an example of a site query for our domain:

There are several options to filter the result:

1. Site + subdomains: site:example.com
2. site + subdomains + WWW: site:www.beispiel.de
3. Page + keyword in domain / text: site:example.de “search term”.
4. page + keyword in domain: site:example.de inurl: “search term”
5. Page + keyword in text: site:example.deintext: “search term”.
6. Page + file extension: site:example.de filetype: “fileextension

Site query as a tool for SEO

For a webmaster, the site query is a good tool to determine which subpages are not being included in the index by the crawler .

You can query Google’s indexing status and identify possible vulnerabilities. It also improves your overview of complexly structured web pages.

If your website has been around for a while and the number of pages indexed by Google is significantly different from the actual subpages, there is probably an indexing problem. This can be caused by duplicate content, for example. Ideally, you check whether there are actually only meaningful URLs in the index.

With the site query you can discover weak points in the indexing, make the reasons visible and correct them afterwards. The number of indexed pages is not related to the traffic of your website. For detailed website analysis, you should use SEO tools.NOTE: Indexing new pages by Google can take some time, only after the crawler has “crawled” the page can indexing be done. So you should give Google a little time after creating a page. it gives an overview of the state of indexing but be careful here: it does not give any information about the traffic of the page. The more complex a website is (many subpages) the more sensible the site query is.A final tip: The number of indexed pages of a domain can be monitored e.g. via the XOVI tool.