How Can I Count the Number of Pages On…
Q: I’m looking for a tool that simply counts how many pages the website has, so I can calculate the inclusion ratio, or the percentage of pages indexed in the search engine. It seems like such a basic thing, yet I’ve been literally searching for hours and can’t find what I’m looking for. Can you help?
A: What a great question. Most people just do a site: search in Google to find the number of pages on their website (for example, you could search for <site:www.yourseoplan.com> and look at the number of pages returned in Google – currently 270 pages). But if you want to find out what portion of your total pages have been indexed by Google, you’ll need another way of counting the total number of pages on your site so you can compare it against Google’s index count.
We suggest using XML sitemaps along with Google Search Console in order to calculate the inclusion ratio of pages indexed in Google. If your website platform cannot create an XML sitemap, you may want to look into using one of the sitemap tools that are available, below are some resources:
- For a small site under 500 pages, you could use the online version at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or Screaming Frog.
- For larger sites, you can review other sitemap generators at: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
If all you do is what to find out how many pages a site has, the sitemap process in this article can do that, or you can look into using a Crawler (like Screaming Frog).
When you have a sitemap created, sign into Google Search Console and follow the steps below (if you don’t have an account, create one!):
- When logged into Google Search Console, go to the Sitemaps section.
- From here, add the sitemap that you created for your website.
- If all goes well, Google will show the URLs you have submitted (see below):
- Google does not show the discovered URLs immediately, but give it a few days and Google will now give you the total pages that it found in your sitemap.
With the submitted and processed sitemap, you can go to the Coverage section in Google Search Console and find a few details on how your site is indexed in Google:
(1) Submitted and Indexed
(2) Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
These two data points will help you understand what known pages are current indexed in Google (916/973, 93%). Along with what other pages that Google may have found and decided to index that you did not know about (99!).
In addition to the above Valid and Indexed pages that Google finds, you can also find information in the Excluded tab of the Coverage Section about the indexing status of your pages. This tab can help you understand why some pages that you may have expected to see in the “Submitted and Indexed” datapoint, but where not.
24 COMMENTS
I did not understand how to instal this tools – SiteCrawler. Can you help me ? Thank you !
instructions for downloading & installing the software can be found on the creator’s website, here: http://www.lightheadsw.com/sitecrawler/
(note that we have no affiliation with this software).
Another spidering tool that is available as of earlier in 2009 is the Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit. Read more about it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/06/03/iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit.aspx. Although this tool must be run on Microsoft Windows Server, your website does not need to be hosted on Windows for it to be spidered.
Many times i have SEO questions in my head, i found your blog on Google and nowhere else. And your articles have never disappointed me once like this one also. However, could you please explain a little more about “using a trend as your metric” Why is it better? And how do i gather the trend info. exactly? Please. (don’t worry i’m not your competitor, my SEO firm is in Thailand) Thanksss
Hi Joe,
When an exact value is not available for a metric, you can watch how it’s trending, rather than the absolute value. In this example, you could monitor whether the number of pages on your website showing up in the search engines is increasing, decreasing, or flat. Watching this trend might allow you to catch indexing problems early, or understand when efforts you’re making are paying off!
I use Xenu Link Sleuth for small sites, I copy all results in excel file and sort/delete. Its a bit lengthy way but it works for me for small sites
i want to know,how to count static pages of a website?Thanks in advance.
Hi there! Thanks for this Q/A forum, this was a particular interesting one. I was asking myself this same question when I realized that Google and Yahoo! indexes where substantially different. To understand how bad was the situation I needed to now the number of total pages of the site to extract an indexation rate and start working on optimization. The new problem is, what am I going to do identify the pages that are not indexed?
I am great fan of xml-sitemaps and have been using for my site http://www.togotutor.com for almost a year now. The only problem I am facing here is with the sitemap for vbulletin forum, which is really complicated to generate and the calender.php takes all the primary url`s during the crawl. So it`s useless If you are not able to aford that seo tool which costs almost 100 bucks.
There is another free tool Gsitecrawler with which you can count the no. of live pages in a website.
Thank you for the crawler info. Google is particularly picky when it comes to site maps. Thanks.
Why can’t you give site: yoursitename.com in google search. Go till the last page and this give the no pof pages that google covered or approx the no of pages
Use the online sitemap generator and it will count your pages and broken links also. You can than fix the broken links easily than.
Yes, The XML Sitemap has a very good tool for counting the web pages, Thanks for informative sharing to all.
The easiest way to check in google is to type
site:www.( domain of your site).com
example
site:www.msn.com
The results google returns are all the pages indexed by google under that domain. Take a look at the url of the displayed page and you will see they all start with www.( domain of your site).com…..etc
hi Trev,
Using the site: search on Google is a common way that people count the number of pages indexed on their site. However, the person asking the question wanted to know how many total pages on their site exist so he could *compare* that number with Google’s indexed number. So, telling him to use Google’s indexed number wouldn’t have been a very helpful answer 🙂
From past 3years, I am using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com to find number of pages in a website..
hi
I want to find the number of pages in a website and I went to this site http://www.xml-sitemaps.com but I could not find what I need. please help me
thanks
One little trick I use to quickly count the number of pages from a competitor website. I go to their sitemap usually http://www.competitor.com/sitemap.xml then I use the search tool of my browser (Ctrl+F) and search for . It gives me the count of occurences (Chrome does at least).
Of course, the sitemap has to be up to date.
Simpler idea is just to type:
site:www.website.com
into Google. This will show you the number of results, and thus number of pages that Google has indexed.
e.g. site://www.yourseoplan.com/ returns 305 results
Possibly not entirely accurate as you may have some broken links or unindexed pages, but I’d say it’s pretty close.
Hi John,
Using the site: search on Google is a common way that people count the number of pages indexed on their site. However, the person asking the question wanted to know how many total pages on their site exist so he could *compare* that number with Google’s indexed number. So, we looked for alternative ways to find this number.
Thanks,
Gradiva
Thank you. Nice and informative article.
i want to count number of images
hmmm this doesn’t help at all if you dont have access to webmasters for a particular site lol, i think the average punter doesn’t even know what webmasters is. People like me and you would Gradiva of course.
I think if you have set up your webmaster account then checking the number of indexed URL is the best way to count website pages.
I just landed on a website which claims to count your website pages but when I checked the same via webmaster account, difference was huge.
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