I have updated this post – see the end!
I bought Andy Black’s Index Checker before Christmas but only recently got around to actually installing it and using it. I liked the sales pitch – it claims to allow you to check any xml site map or RSS feed to see which url’s are indexed. This seemed to me quite useful to double check that my articles on Web 2.0 properties such as HubPages were indexed.
The product is a $7 instant download which you then need to install on one of your own domains. The instructions are detailed and accurate and I certainly managed to install Andy Black’s Index Checker on my Hostgator account with no problems.
The problems came when I tried checking the indexing of my articles on Hubpages and EzineArticles.com – check out my first ever screencast below to see why I won’t be recommending this product – even for $7.
For a larger version of the video click here.
UPDATE
As you can see in the comments Andy is acutally a respnsive and responsible developer who gets major kudos for showing up and supporting his product! In the video below I was using an outdated version of the software – its now just a matter of drop down lists to chose ezinearticles/hubpages/squidoo feeds. Still not perfect – ezinearticles does some odd stuff with titles with a dash in them – you might want to avoid those in the future anyways -and Hubpages is still only giving me the last 10 results – but Andy’s working on it! Meanwhile here is my shameless affliate link
Actually I forgot to mention in the video – the Index Checker failed entirely to manage the RSS feed for this blog which is a feedburner freed!
Help guys- this is the first time I’ve done a screen cast – am I speaking slowly enough? Its a Kiwi trick to speak too fast, especially compared to Americans – so have I slowed it down enough? Did I make you dizy with the mouse moves?
Why Indexing is Important
Its quite possible for a site to have PageRank and yet not be indexed in Google! If I am doing guest posting or otherwise considering using a third party’s site to get a link back to my site I always double check the age of the site’s cache in Google (Google the site’s url and click “cache” in the results) – it shouldn’t be more than about 10 days old, and also check how many pages are indexed (site:theirsite.com in google.com and then go to advance to see how recnetly pages have been indexed).
Checking for Indexing of Articles
This is what I do to keep an eye on which support and other articles of mine are indexing and how fast.
- I use Google Alerts on my author names – that tells me exactly when an article is indexed;
- I use link:mysite.com in Google Alerts to know when a link is indexed in Google (they will never tell you them all!);
- Grab a sentence or so of the published article and google it with quotes – you will find not just he original article but all the copies as well -if you are after plagarists chose a phrase from lower than the first paragraph – some smart ones will re-write the first paragraph.
So for now I don’t have a program that automates the checking of my support article’s indexing – Andy Black’s IndexChecker isn’t the answer for this problem – does anymore have an automated tool for this? One that actually works?