Google has introduced a new Index Status feature in its Webmaster Tools. If you are a webmaster that wants to study the number of URLs indexed in the past year along with several other finer details then this feature would be of great help to you.
You just have to go to the Health Menu in Webmaster Tools to access this new feature and will be rewarded with a graph that displays the indexed data for the past year. The regular graph will just display the sum of all URLs indexed by Google although you should remember that not all URLs are indexed by its search engine.
This could be due to several reasons such as those that have specifically been blocked by the robots.txt file or others that have been redirected towards other pages or even those that are very much alike other pages. All these details can again be viewed by using the advanced tab that displays a detailed graph with different colors to indicate the total number of URLs that have been indexed in blue along with “ever crawled” in red, “not selected” in green, and “blocked by robots” in beige color.
As a webmaster, this information can be very useful to check the status of your own webpage since the displayed graph and data will inform you if Google has any trouble indexing your pages and reasons as to why they are not being indexed. This could be due to duplicate or similar content on your web pages, automatic generation of pages, or even due to technical reasons caused by canonicalization. It could also be caused due to hacking.
If you have changed your website’s URL structure in a manner that does not support Google’s recommendations then you can check the index status of your URL with this useful tool. Any other indexing problem will also be noticed and displayed by Google, which in turn will help you rectify the problem as well as improve your strategies in future to please Google bots. In the meantime, an export function in this feature would be a welcome addition and hopefully Google might include this function in future updates.