By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Google Webmaster Tools report that tells your dealership how many pages have indexed on your website over the last year. Unfortunately the information on its own is a little vague, and can be difficult to fully use when taken on its own. For example, a big segment of the data revolves around how many website pages are not selected for indexing. What does that mean? Google says that:
“A URL can be not selected for indexing for many reasons including:
- It redirects to another page
- It has a rel=”canonical” to another page
- Our algorithms have detected that its contents are substantially similar to another URL and picked the other URL to represent the content.”
The information in this report can be used in many ways, but a couple that really stand out to me are:
1) When your dealership changes providers, hires an SEO company, or hires a content creation company–you can use the tool to watch how many more pages Google indexes over time
2) When you are writing content (or having content written on your behalf), like on a blog, you can see whether Google is indexing it (which content does get indexed, what doesn’t, etc)
I think what is really important for dealerships to understand is that this report gives a lot of relevant, important information, but taken alone, can be overwhelming and misinterpreted. Discuss this with your dealership’s website provider to help fully understand what it all means.
