If you can’t find your website in a search engine’s results, you should enter “site:” your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engine’s index. If all you get back is a blank page, then you’re not in the search engine’s database at all – you need to wait longer. This trick of typing “site:www.yourdomain.com” also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.

On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page. You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.