One of the most common questions about search engine optimization is whether a page (and website) has been indexed by search engines. Google has just released a new feature dubbed Index Status in Webmaster Tools which shows just how many pages from a site have been included in the Google index.

Located under the Health menu, the Index Status feature (a graph – seen below) shows up to one year of data.

Google indicated that a steadily increasing number of indexed pages should be enough to confirm that new content is being discovered, crawled and indexed, but if there are issues, webmaster can look even deeper into the data to identify potential causes.

Under the Advanced Tab of the Index Status feature, webmasters can access the totals of indexed pages, along with the cumulative number of pages crawled, and the number of pages which Google knows about but which are not crawled (blocked by robots.txt perhaps), as well as the number of pages that were not selected for included in the results.